Figuring Out Conscientious Degree from Brightness Distribution in IADL

摘要

Because of the rapid increase of the elderly, the lack of helpers to take care of the elderly has become a serious problem in Japan. A way should be found to enable the elderly to be independent as long as possible. The paper refers to the motivation to keep the quality of life high as living willingness. The elderly with living willingness would keep their living environments comfortable. On the contrary, the elderly losing their living willingness are likely to make disorder in their house keeping, such as lazy cleaning and skipping of dish washing. The detection of the disorder of their daily activities makes it possible to find the decline of their living willingness early, because the disorder implies their physical and mental health get worse. Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) plays an important role to find the disorder. The activities are conducted to improve the quality of life. The laziness of the elderly in IADL implies they are losing their motivation to improve the quality of life. The paper proposes a method to recognize IADL, preserving the privacy of the elderly. It also figures out conscientious degree the elderly take IADL. The method uses the brightness distribution sensor. It provides a classifier of IADL from the brightness distribution. In an experiment for the elderly, the f-measure with which the method has recognized activities of cleaning, cooking, and washing are 0.975, 0.912, and 0.927, respectively. The experiment shows 0.599 in Nagelkerke R~2, which indicates how well the method figures out conscientious degree in the activities. It reveals the method is precise enough to measure the decline of the elderly in the living willingness.