%0 Journal Article
%T Context-Aware AAL Services through a 3D Sensor-Based Platform
%A Alessandro Leone
%A Giovanni Diraco
%A Pietro Siciliano
%J Journal of Sensors
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/792978
%X The main goal of Ambient Assisted Living solutions is to provide assistive technologies and services in smart environments allowing elderly people to have high quality of life. Since 3D sensing technologies are increasingly investigated as monitoring solution able to outperform traditional approaches, in this work a noninvasive monitoring platform based on 3D sensors is presented providing a wide-range solution suitable in several assisted living scenarios. Detector nodes are managed by low-power embedded PCs in order to process 3D streams and extract postural features related to person¡¯s activities. The feature level of details is tuned in accordance with the current context in order to save bandwidth and computational resources. The platform architecture is conceived as a modular system suitable to be integrated into third-party middleware to provide monitoring functionalities in several scenarios. The event detection capabilities were validated by using both synthetic and real datasets collected in controlled and real-home environments. Results show the soundness of the presented solution to adapt to different application requirements, by correctly detecting events related to four relevant AAL services. 1. Introduction During the last years, the interest of the scientific community in smart environments has grown very fast especially within the European Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) Program with the aim of increasing the independent living and the quality of life of older people. The design of AAL systems is normally based on the use of monitoring infrastructures provided by smart environments. Such infrastructures include heterogeneous sensing devices in ad hoc networks with distributed data processing resources and coordinated by intelligent agents, offering information analysis and decision making capabilities. Human activities monitoring is a crucial function of AAL systems, especially in detection of critical situations (e.g., falls and abnormal behaviors) or as support during the execution of relevant tasks (e.g., daily living activities and training/rehabilitation exercises). Generally, human monitoring systems are based on both wearable devices or environmental equipment. In the first case, markers or kinematic sensors (e.g., MEMS accelerometers or gyroscopes) are worn by the end user for body¡¯s movements detection. Recently Baek et al. [1] have presented a necklace embedding a triaxial accelerometer and a gyroscope able to distinguish falls from regular ADLs (activities of daily living) by measuring the angle of the upper body to the ground.
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/js/2013/792978/