Smart bedroom for elderly using kinect

摘要

Ideas of building smart homes have been around for many years. However, most of them have been confined to laboratories or specially built, expensive homes due to the high cost of sensory hardware and software. In order to make some of those ideas realized for average-income households, we could resort to lower cost devices and focus more on smaller space like a bedroom or living room. Kinect sensors are able to capture motions of a human and present them as a series of time-dependent skeletons. They have been utilized in many fields such as entertainment, security, and health care. Particularly, they could be applied to assist the elderly population of which the number has been increasing substantially around the world when compared to other age groups. This work proposes the simple yet effective system that would facilitate the daily activities of an elderly person in a bedroom, e.g., helping the elderly turn on or turn off electric devices such as a television, electric fan, or room light without touching them or their remote controls. The system could also detect and alert the elderly of falling out of bed and monitor signs of abnormity or any need of assistance so that family members or caregiver could be timely notified.