Team: Ruiqi, Yi and Ola
Project Idea
Elderly people by definition from the United Nations are an age group of people from 60 years or over. Reports from the studies carried out by the United Nations show that there is a rapid increase in the number of seniors compared to the number of birthrates. in 2018 the number of falls from elderly people recorded was 35.6 million, out of this number 8.4 million resulted in injury while an estimated number of 32, 000 lost their lives as a result of the fall.
FIg. 1 Picture of an elderly woman falling
Therefore, there is a need to provide an alternative and better way for caring for the elderly which is the introduction of assistive technologies in their living area. We are developing a robot that will help detect their health conditions and send signals to necessary authorities.
To solve the above-described challenges of existing methods for daily eldercare monitoring, we propose Ws-Bot, an approach that combines the strengths of wearable sensors and the benefits of robotic systems to enhance daily monitoring for elder people. The wearable sensors can provide 24-7 and user-friendly monitoring for direct biosignals of elder people which is beyond the ability of robotic systems. On the other hand, robotics systems can make up for the shortcoming of wearable sensors: providing verification to help eliminate the noise signals from sensors and enable efficient information conveyance. Fig. 2 illustrates the framework and workflow of our system, Ws-Bot, which consists of four parts: elder people, responders, host, wearable system and robot system.
Fig. 2 Illustration of Framework
The System Breakdown:
Elder people – This presents an age group of people from 60 years or over who need to be monitored.
Responders – This refers to people who receive the alarm of emergency events of elderly people and provide help, for example, the family members and health professionals.
Host – This represents the central host that serves as the bridge connecting the wearable system, the robot system and the users in our system. And the potential function of the host is to provide cloud computing power for the robot system. We plan to use a laptop as the host and utilize Wi-Fi or ROS as the communication means.
Wearable System – This refers to wearable sensors worn by elder people. We plan to utilize the E4 wristband [13] as the hardware in this system, and the signals captured include Heart Rate (HR), Accelerometer (ACC), Skin Temperature (SKT) and Blood Volume Pulse (BVP). ACC is used for safety monitoring, e.g., falling down, while others are used for health monitoring, e.g., heart disease, fever and cardiovascular disease. We will use the cloud platform provided by the sensor itself for data conveying and develop some algorithms to assess the safety and health metric based on the raw data.
Robot System – The robot system refers to a mobile robot that serves as an additional source for monitoring elder people. The functions of the robot system are to 1. verify abnormal events detected by the wearable system; 2. provide alarms and reminders for elder people; 3. capture and convey visual situational information for responders.
To this end, we have to finish three tasks: 1. develop the computer vision system that can detect and localize elder people and capture situational scenarios; 2. develop the navigation system that can find and navigate to the elder people as soon as possible; 3. develop the voice system that can offer reminder and alarm to elder people by voice.
For the first task, we plan to adapt YOLOv3. And we plan to utilize some navigation packages provided by ROS to combine with the vision system for task 2. For the third task, we plan to search for some open-source API that provides text-to-sound functions.
We have installed Ubuntu on our system because we are working on ROS, and we will be testing the navigation robots also.
CNIT 581 Spring 2022 Projec 