Validation of a remote monitoring system for the elderly: application to mobility measurements

The aim of this paper is to introduce a smart tool for the assessment of the mobility of patient with motor disorders and to evaluate its performance through some initial experiments. These experiments are based on a system which is composed of sensors connected to a Personal Computer (PC) using data acquisition cards and a communication network. The PC includes a data acquisition and processing software. This system has been installed in a patient's housing (a bedroom and a washroom) in a long-stay setting. Pre-established travel and activity (going to bed, getting up, visiting the washroom em leader ) patterns of patient in the housing including their duration have been defined by physicians for the experiments. A volunteer participated in the experiments and the results of his mobility obtained by the data processing software were compared with his real mobility. An agreement was found between the proposed assessment system and the experiments, thereby validating functioning of the whole system. Then, the system has been used to monitor a patient over a period of 39 nights. Again there is a good agreement between the characteristics derived from the system and the findings of the caring staff in charge of the patient's routine night monitoring. Data collected during 24 consecutive hours have been used to identify and characterise the patient's whole day mobility. This study paves the way for a new assessment system of the mobility of patient thus allowing the follow up of patients suffering from dementia and to study their significant mobility changes over time by introducing an indicator of mobility which can be used to assess their motor behavioural disorders.