Research on monitoring of physical and mental reserve capacities at home

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This project was an attempt to establish a method of monitoring physical and mental reserve capacities at home. A monitoring instrument, called multi-sensor logger, was developed for this purpose. It has two motion sensors, two acceleration sensors, an audio microphone, a humidity sensor, a temperature sensor, and an illuminance sensor. Two sets of multi-sensor logger were placed in a house so that difference in daily activities at different places could be monitored. For evaluation studies, a bicycle ergometer and a wearable body acceleration sensor (actigraph) were used to estimate the maximum level of physical activity, and we asked the subjects to record mental stresses occurred during monitoring. In the preliminary study, it was confirmed that the multi-sensor logger system works perfectly so that the feature of daily activity was clearly reflected on the obtained trend data, and the observed pattern of daily activity correlated well to the body acceleration data. Unfortunately, due to the resignation of an investigator, the progress of the project had delayed largely behind the initially planned schedule, and consequently, expected results to estimate reserve capacities could not be obtained yet even at the end of the assigned period. At present, the evaluation study in the home of isolate-living elderly is still continued, and it can be expected that the study will be completed soon. Although the obtained result is quite poor at present and thus we could not confirm the effectiveness of the monitoring method, the basic concept of this project is still reasonable and we believe that the attempt performed through three years was not insignificant.