Mobility Assessment of Demented People Using Pose Estimation and Movement Detection - An Experimental Study in the Field of Ambient Assisted Living
The European population will steadily be growing older in the following decades. At the same time, the risk of

getting dementia increases with higher age. Both these factors are apt to cause serious problems for the society,

especially with regard to the caring sector, which also suffers from the lack of qualified personnel. As technical

support systems can be of assistance to medical staff and patients, a mobility assessment system for demented

people is presented in this paper. The grade of mobility is measured by means of the personâs pose and

movements in a monitored area. For this purpose, pose estimation and movement detection algorithms have

been developed. These process 3-D data, which are provided by an optical stereo sensor installed in a living

environment. In order to train and test a discriminative classifier a variety of labelled training and test data

was recorded. Moreover, we designed a discriminative and universal feature vector for pose estimation. The

experiments demonstrated that the algorithms work robustly. In connection with a human machine interface,

the system facilitates a mobilisation as well as a more valid assessment of the patientâs medical condition than

it is presently the case.