Measuring People Activity with Smart Homes

摘要

This work describes the use of smart homes to assess the health and wellbeing of people by measuring and displaying their activity at home. This is accomplished by the use of motion sensors, switches, pulse counters and touch screen displays. Pulse counters keep track of events and paths. An event is the triggering of a sensor, and a path is the distance between two sensors. There are counters for measuring positive and negative activities. Activities like walking, pedaling a static bicycle, and showering are displayed hourly, daily, and monthly with the same displays used for metering water and electricity. The activity patterns show hours of quietness, sleeping time, time without activity and their interruptions, like waking up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Several hours of continuos inactivity during the day may trigger a panic call in the burglar alarm central, requesting a call back.