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

加拿大人口正在老龄化。2010年，估计有480万加拿大人年龄在65岁或以上。到2051年，预计大约四分之一的加拿大人年龄将达到或超过65岁。由于加拿大对人口老龄化有如此明显的偏见，因此需要投入大量资源为老年人提供服务。这一建议的前提是，住在自己家里可以提高老年人的生活质量，增加照顾者的选择，并减少对保健资源的压力。该研究项目旨在提供一种低成本的智能家居监控解决方案，以降低无人看管的紧急情况的风险。拟议的研究将推动使用视频、深度、运动和音频传感器来确定受监测房屋内居住者的健康状况的最新技术。

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.