"Intelligent monitoring for elderly and the disabled using vision , depth, motion and audio sensors"

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The Canadian population is ageing. In 2010, an estimated 4.8 million Canadians were 65 years of age or older. By 2051, about one in four Canadians are expected to be of age 65 years or older. With such a significant bias towards an ageing population in Canada, an enormous amount of resources need to be devoted to the services to cater for the elderly. This proposal is based on the premise that living in their own home increases the quality of life of elderly, increases the options for caregivers and reduces the pressure on health-care resources. This program of research aims to provide a lower-cost, smart home monitoring solution that will reduce the risk of an unattended emergency. Proposed research will advance the state of the art in using video, depth, motion and audio sensors to determine the state of well-being of occupants within the monitored home. To achieve this goal, on short-term this proposal will a) develop algorithms for integrating data from multiple video and depth cameras and obtain accurate and consistent estimates of location, identity and pose of an individual, b) develop a physics-based model to estimate pose from video and depth cameras in real-time and c) develop tracking algorithms that can incorporate location, identity and pose information together with data motion and audio sensors. On the long term, this proposal will investigate use of passive infra-red cameras for estimating vital signs, develop an action recognition system and create a full-size prototype for validating the algorithms. This research will also develop a comprehensive security model for data access as well as develop privacy guidelines and auditing mechanisms to ensure that privacy and security requirements are met. By achieving the short and long term objectives, it is expected to make a significant contribution to the area of activity recognition. Such advances, when combined with the focus on elderly monitoring will yield significant engineering solutions to a looming problem that is sure to consume significant national resources in the coming decades.