Bed detection for monitoring system in hospital wards

Patient monitoring system has been providing a means for caregivers to regularly observe patients' condition in a multiple intensive care units from a single remote location in hospitals. In addition, the system may provide an addition layer of care, which includes software tools that support analysis of patients' vital signs, trends etc. To allow visual surveillance, cameras are installed in the patient wards. From the clinical observation, the key area in the hospital are around and on the bed as most of the activities take place and where patients spend most of their time. Therefore detecting the bed is the first basic task in studying and monitoring the patients' behavior. We have developed a novel technique in detecting the patient bed. This technique is based on Canny Edge detector and Hough Transformation. The algorithm is tested and the experimental results show that our proposed method can effectively locate the position of the patient bed.