Sep 29, 2006: Sensing Technology in Eldercare
Filed in: Edison
Series
Dr. James Keller, University of Missouri
Older adults are living longer and more fulfilled lives, and they desire to live as independently as possible in the home of their choice. However, independent lifestyles come with risks that are complicated by chronic illness and impairments in mobility, cognition, and the senses. In response to this trend, the University of Missouri has been investigating new approaches in caring for the elderly. One recent example of this research focus has resulted in TigerPlace, a 32-unit apartment complex for seniors that opened in Columbia, Missouri in 2004. A joint venture between MU's Sinclair School of Nursing and Americare Systems Inc., TigerPlace is one of four projects granted state approval to operate under the "aging in place" model of care giving. Under that model, residents who would otherwise be required by state law to live in nursing homes may have health services brought to them in their apartments instead.
Technology that can help seniors "age in place" has been spotlighted in recent years, spurred by the aging population. One focus of our research is the creation of intelligent systems that use sensors to uncover patterns of activity helpful to caregivers, especially targeting mobility and cognitive impairment. Details can be found at http://eldertech.missouri.edu. This is a large interdisciplinary effort including faculty, students and postdocs from Engineering, Nursing, Health Management and Informatics, Social Work, and Physical Therapy along with a group of colleagues at the University of Virginia. In this talk, after a brief overview, I will highlight two of the research activities related to the engineering aspects of our work. The first involves silhouette extraction and tracking with video sensors. Privacy is a crucial issue for the application of video in the sensor suite. Hence, we have chosen to only capture silhouettes for subsequent processing, for example, to detect falls. Our approach primarily uses color features to determine the human and remove shadows. The background is dynamically updated and fuzzy logic is used to "detach" objects held by the person since those objects can distort the silhouette features for activity analysis. Improvements to this process include the addition and fusion of texture features and the use of 3-D graphical models to match the silhouette to aid in segmentation. Preliminary work on constructing Hidden Markov Models to detect falls will be shown. A second application of fuzzy logic involves building a scoring mechanism to soften (and to increase the sensitivity of) the crisp time threshold-based method in assessing physical mobility through a standard test. The real payoff will be realized with our proposed "continuous" passive monitoring where we can track changes in physical performance by sensing everyday activities.
James M. Keller received the Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1978. He holds the University of Missouri Curators' Professorship in the Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science Departments on the Columbia campus. He is also the R. L. Tatum Professor in the College of Engineering. His research interests center on computational intelligence: fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic, neural networks, and evolutionary computation with a focus on problems in computer vision, pattern recognition, and information fusion including bioinformatics, spatial reasoning in robotics, sensor and information analysis in technology for eldercare, and landmine detection. He has been funded by several industrial and government institutions, including the Electronics and Space Corporation, Union Electric, Geo-Centers, NSF, the Administration on Aging, NASA/JSC, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Research Office, the Office of Naval Research, and the Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate. Dr. Keller has coauthored over 250 technical publications.
Jim is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for whom he has presented live and video tutorials on fuzzy logic in computer vision, is a national lecturer for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is an IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Distinguished Lecturer, and is a past President of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society (NAFIPS). He finished a full six year term as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, and is on the editorial board of Pattern Analysis and Applications, Fuzzy Sets and Systems, International Journal of Fuzzy Systems, and the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems. He is currently the Vice President for Publications of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He was the conference chair of the 1991 NAFIPS Workshop, program co-chair of the 1996 NAFIPS meeting, program co-chair of the 1997 IEEE International Conference on Neural Networks, and the program chair of the 1998 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems. He was the general chair for the 2003 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems.
Abstract
Older adults are living longer and more fulfilled lives, and they desire to live as independently as possible in the home of their choice. However, independent lifestyles come with risks that are complicated by chronic illness and impairments in mobility, cognition, and the senses. In response to this trend, the University of Missouri has been investigating new approaches in caring for the elderly. One recent example of this research focus has resulted in TigerPlace, a 32-unit apartment complex for seniors that opened in Columbia, Missouri in 2004. A joint venture between MU's Sinclair School of Nursing and Americare Systems Inc., TigerPlace is one of four projects granted state approval to operate under the "aging in place" model of care giving. Under that model, residents who would otherwise be required by state law to live in nursing homes may have health services brought to them in their apartments instead.
Technology that can help seniors "age in place" has been spotlighted in recent years, spurred by the aging population. One focus of our research is the creation of intelligent systems that use sensors to uncover patterns of activity helpful to caregivers, especially targeting mobility and cognitive impairment. Details can be found at http://eldertech.missouri.edu. This is a large interdisciplinary effort including faculty, students and postdocs from Engineering, Nursing, Health Management and Informatics, Social Work, and Physical Therapy along with a group of colleagues at the University of Virginia. In this talk, after a brief overview, I will highlight two of the research activities related to the engineering aspects of our work. The first involves silhouette extraction and tracking with video sensors. Privacy is a crucial issue for the application of video in the sensor suite. Hence, we have chosen to only capture silhouettes for subsequent processing, for example, to detect falls. Our approach primarily uses color features to determine the human and remove shadows. The background is dynamically updated and fuzzy logic is used to "detach" objects held by the person since those objects can distort the silhouette features for activity analysis. Improvements to this process include the addition and fusion of texture features and the use of 3-D graphical models to match the silhouette to aid in segmentation. Preliminary work on constructing Hidden Markov Models to detect falls will be shown. A second application of fuzzy logic involves building a scoring mechanism to soften (and to increase the sensitivity of) the crisp time threshold-based method in assessing physical mobility through a standard test. The real payoff will be realized with our proposed "continuous" passive monitoring where we can track changes in physical performance by sensing everyday activities.
Bio
James M. Keller received the Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1978. He holds the University of Missouri Curators' Professorship in the Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science Departments on the Columbia campus. He is also the R. L. Tatum Professor in the College of Engineering. His research interests center on computational intelligence: fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic, neural networks, and evolutionary computation with a focus on problems in computer vision, pattern recognition, and information fusion including bioinformatics, spatial reasoning in robotics, sensor and information analysis in technology for eldercare, and landmine detection. He has been funded by several industrial and government institutions, including the Electronics and Space Corporation, Union Electric, Geo-Centers, NSF, the Administration on Aging, NASA/JSC, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Research Office, the Office of Naval Research, and the Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate. Dr. Keller has coauthored over 250 technical publications.
Jim is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for whom he has presented live and video tutorials on fuzzy logic in computer vision, is a national lecturer for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is an IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Distinguished Lecturer, and is a past President of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society (NAFIPS). He finished a full six year term as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, and is on the editorial board of Pattern Analysis and Applications, Fuzzy Sets and Systems, International Journal of Fuzzy Systems, and the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems. He is currently the Vice President for Publications of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He was the conference chair of the 1991 NAFIPS Workshop, program co-chair of the 1996 NAFIPS meeting, program co-chair of the 1997 IEEE International Conference on Neural Networks, and the program chair of the 1998 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems. He was the general chair for the 2003 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems.