As aging populations continue to grow, primarily in developed countries, there are increasing demands for the system that monitors the activities of elderly people while continuing to allow them to pursue their individual, healthy, and independent lifestyles. Therefore, it is required to develop the activity of daily living (ADL) sensing systems that are based on high-performance sensors and information technologies. However, most of the systems that have been proposed to date have only been investigated and/or evaluated in experimental environments. When considering the spread of such systems to typical homes inhabited by elderly people, it is clear that such sensing systems will need to meet the following five requirements: (1) be inexpensive; (2) provide robustness; (3) protect privacy; (4) be maintenance-free; and, (5) work with a simple user interface. In this paper, we propose a novel senior-friendly ADL sensing system that can fulfill these requirements. More specifically, we achieve an easy collection of ADL data from elderly people while using a proposed system that consists of a small number of inexpensive energy harvesting sensors and simple annotation buttons, without the need for privacy-invasive cameras or microphones. In order to evaluate the practicality of our proposed system, we installed it in ten typical homes with elderly residents and collected the ADL data over a two-month period. We then visualized the collected data and performed activity recognition using a long short-term memory (LSTM) model. From the collected results, we confirmed that our proposed system, which is inexpensive and non-invasive, can correctly collect resident ADL data and could recognize activities from the collected data with a high recall rate of 72.3% on average. This result shows a high potential of our proposed system for application to services for elderly people.

Wireless sensing represented by WiFi channel state information (CSI) is now enabling various fields of applications such as person identification, human activity recognition, occupancy detection, localization, and crowd estimation these days. So far, those fields are mostly considered as separate topics in WiFi CSI-based methods, on the contrary, some camera and vision-based crowd estimation systems intuitively estimate both crowd size and location at the same time. Our work is inspired by the idea that WiFi CSI also may be able to perform the same as the camera does. In this paper, we construct Wi-CaL, a simultaneous crowd counting and localization system by using ESP32 modules for WiFi links. We extract several features that contribute to dynamic state (moving crowd) and static state (location of the crowd) from the CSI bundles, then assess our system by both conventional machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL). As a result of ML-based evaluation, we achieved 0.35 median absolute error (MAE) of counting and 91.4% of localization accuracy with five people in a small-sized room, and 0.41 MAE of counting and 98.1% of localization accuracy with 10 people in a medium-sized room, by leave-one-session-out cross-validation. We compared our result with percentage of non-zero elements metric (PEM), which is a state-of-the-art metric for crowd counting, and confirmed that our system shows higher performance (0.41 MAE, 81.8% of within-1-person error) than PEM (0.62 MAE, 66.5% of within-1-person error).

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