Real-time elderly activity monitoring system based on a tri-axial accelerometer

The purpose of this study is to develop an automatic human movement classification system for the elderly using single waist-mounted tri-axial accelerometer.

Real-time movement classification algorithm was developed using a hierarchical binary tree, which can classify activities of daily living into four general states: (1) resting state such as sitting, lying, and standing; (2) locomotion state such as walking and running; (3) emergency state such as fall and (4) transition state such as sit to stand, stand to sit, stand to lie, lie to stand, sit to lie, and lie to sit. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, experiments were performed on five healthy young subjects with several activities, such as falls, walking, running, etc.

The results of experiment showed that successful detection rate of the system for all activities were about 96%. To evaluate long-term monitoring, 3 h experiment in home environment was performed on one healthy subject and 98% of the movement was successfully classified.

The results of experiment showed a possible use of this system which can monitor and classify the activities of daily living. For further improvement of the system, it is necessary to include more detailed classification algorithm to distinguish several daily activities.