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Smart Postural Monitor for Elderly People

Conference Paper · June 2013

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 Smart Postural Monitor for Elderly People
Vincenzo DI LECCE
Cataldo GUARAGNELLA
DEE - Politecnico di Bari
Via Re David 200, 70125, Bari, Italy
v.dilecce@aeflab.net, guaragnella@poliba.it
Abstract— Wrong postural behaviors can indicate a main and
preliminary marker of malaise in elderly people. It is possible
to better control this kind of posture behavior problems by
means of Smart home monitoring technologies: the body
posture can be modeled using information resulting from
specific built- in sensors of a bed or an armchair. This paper
presents a Smartphone application able to transform a bed or
an armchair into an intelligent device. A friendly interface has
been defined in order to make this application also suitable for
unskilled users.
Keywords: elderly people assistance, postural monitor, smart
device, smartphone interface
I. INTRODUCTION
Traditionally, the (temporary or permanent) care of elderly
and disabled people care has always relied on family members,
often, within the family household. Elderly people represent the
faster-growing segment of population in the world. The care of
a not-self-sufficient elderly people is often carried out in a
discontinuous way, while a continuous monitoring system for
accidental illness or diseases can be pursued by dedicated
persons even if the cost of such interventions is very high and
not affordable by a large part of the social classes.
In many countries, due to the loss of family structure, not-
self-sufficient person (NSSP - here defined as people over 65
years or disabled) care is now being provided by the State or
charity institutions. These changes affect North America and
European countries, but now they are affecting Asian and South
America countries also [1].It has to be noticed that the cost of
the care is paid, directly or indirectly, by the family.
Oftentimes, family members employ much of their time to take
care of a NSSP.
It is well known that elderly and disabled people are
characterized by reduced mobility, tiredness and walking
disturbs. These people are forced to spend more time on bed or
on armchair, so that the largest part of the daily/nightly activity
of patients can be tracked by structuring their armchairs and
beds by efficient monitoring systems able to highlight
anomalous situations. It is clear that postural and behavioral
observation represents a significant source of information on
patient status. The application does not represent a remotely
operable monitoring system: the aim of the paper is to define a
Jessica UVA
Fondazione Beato Nunzio Sulprizio
Via Battisti 732, 74121, Taranto, Italy
j.uva@aeflab.net
suitable and simple sensor able to collect data taken by sensors
placed under armchairs and/or bed a s to measure the
activity of the elderly people and t h e n highlight
anomalous situations along all the daily or nightly activity.
The activity of the patient is processed by a light algorithm
and the data locally stored on the device. The information is
transmitted by Bluetooth (BT) wireless link from the sensor
s y s t e m t o a s m a r t -phone e q u i p p e d w i t h a s p e c i f i c
application.
The choice of smart-phone is almost obvious, due to its
ever growing spread and the possibility of avoiding other costs
for the monitoring system deployment. The Smartphone is
characterized by a high capability in data connection, both
local and global area services, a n d a large (3” or more)
graphic display [3]. Also the operative system has become
more and more similar to a personal computer.
II. DESCRIPTION OF THE SYSTEM
The system consists of a low power BT sensing system to
acquire sensors data that are locally preprocessed and stored, to
be placed under the armchairs and bed legs.
A Java application can be developed for the smart-phone to
present results of the acquired data in visual way.
The system is intended to transfer information from the
local acquisition system via BT link to the smart-phone as long
as the smart-phone enters the visibility BT neighborhood of the
acquisition system.
Due to the low power consumption, the BT radio
subsystem is in operation mode only on request of the u-
controller when the data transfer has to be addressed. This
requires a given duty cycle operation to be defined to be
effective and ready for its working. The sensing subsystem,
also, is put in sleep mode also to avoid data acquisition when
out of place.
Also in this case, the u-controller has to implement a given
operational duty cycle to prevent useless data acquisition and
storage.
The data acquired by means of resistive sensors placed under
the armchair legs allow for defining some kind of activity on
the chair. Precise classification of the activity has not been
carried out yet. At the moment the detection of presence and when elderly person is properly sat, the smile emoticon ( )
motion of a person on the chair is feasible and traceable [8-9]. will be generated, but after a movement another emoticon such
Once measurement time series are complete, a filtering as (figure 2) is generated. A hypothetical string that
procedure is applied by means of time-domain convolution provides easy visual information on sleeping or sitting mode
with a specific low pass filter: low frequencies refer to could be so represented:
stationary cases and are important for measuring the weight of
the person, so as to avoid misleading contributions coming
from objects eventually dropped on the chair. Higher frequency
terms correspond to changes in position and activity on the
armchair and they are considered as important elements to
process. Anyway, high frequency terms are normally affected
by noise, so that a proper choice of the signal bandwidth is
required. The filter used depends on the sampling frequency
employed to represent our time series. A high sampling
frequency cannot be used both for required on board
processing parameters and memory storage.

Time series of the four legs of the armchair are stored on

the memory unit and sent to simple software able to exploit
correlation and jointly filter the information. On the matter of
fact, as the person weight is distributed on the four legs, on the
basis of the joint values appearing at a given instant, it is
possible to estimate the mass center of the person sitting on the
chair. The time sequence of the four legs are used at each time
instant to establish the mass center of the body on the chair,
and a simple complex time series is used to describe the person
activity in the time domain [10]. Both real and imaginary parts
of the signal thus represent movements across and along the
armchair directions. Due to the noise presence in the estimation
process, also this complex signature of the person activity
needs a filtering. Trajectories of the centroid represent in the
time domain the person activity and can be stored on the local
memory until the transfer to the Smartphone is performed [7].
Figure 1. Visual information by emoticon interface
of an elderly person in sitting posture.
III. THE PROPOSED TRACKING SYSTEM
We have considered the average weight distribution of the
human body as shown in figure 2, that is: the legs are about
20% of the total body weight, while each arm is about 6% of
the total body weight and the head is 8-9%. Thus, the thorax
and abdomen (including spine and pelvic bones) constitute
about 60% of the total.

In the preliminary test the sampling frequency is set to 1 Hz

and the observation period to 30 minutes. During these 30
minutes, the patient can stand still or move a certain number of
times. The system sends the information to Smartphone. The
signal is represented by emoticon (facial expression) used to
show how many times the elderly has change the position on
the bed or on the chair. We have chosen six kinds of
emoticons:

for motionless state in half hour;

for 1 movement and/or stable barycentre;
for 2 movements and/or slow barycentre movement;
for 3 movements and/or barycentre movement;
for 4 movements and/or fast barycentre movement;
more than 5 movements and/or trembling. Figure 2. Center of gravity of a person in sitting posture. In red there are body
segmental lengths and in green there is weight distribution.
The movement, detected by the force sensors, produces a
signal acquired by controller. The acquired signal was treated
according to the previous technique and coded in 6 clusters. A graph is used to represent the articulated motions of body
Every half hour the fitting emoticon was added to the symbol parts with reference to fixed bones articulations in order to
string (the string length is of 12 emoticons equivalent to 6 define possible shifting of each body part centroid [2]. The
relationship between the global centroid position and the
hours) and sent to the Smartphone (if present). For example,
position of body parts is not one-to-one, so that only guesses
of possible postures are addressed and not necessarily the true y) coordinates of the centroid position. Figures 3-4-5-6 report
ones. the (x, y) the preliminary results of the tests.
A given posture originates at the same time an estimated
centroid position. From this knowledge and from the possible
relative positions of body parts it is possible to argue the
posture of the person sitting on the armchair.
Starting from the computed weight measurements on the
four legs of the armchair, the centroid position has been
computed as in figures 4-5-6, where a pattern of the coordinate
system is reported and the assumption of the posture is
computed. The centroid positions have been computed as the
force centroid measured on the four legs of the armchair as:
4 4

∑ F i⋅ x i ∑ F i⋅ y i
i= 1 i= 1
xG= 4 and y G = 4 (1)
∑ Fi ∑ Fi
i= 1 i=1

Figure 4. Armchair drawing and legs localization

where xi and yi are the coordinates of the four armchair legs in
the given reference system and Fi the measured forces. The
body model is used to try to define a given posture of the
person on the chair with respect to the relative weight of each
body part and its allowed topological relationships in the
human body.

An activity index is issued on the basis of the number of

posture changes on the chair [4]. These are highlighted in the
graph as the number of peaks in the derivative of the acquired
centroid complex signal per time unit.

Also, the body model in figure 2 can be used in conjunction

with a graph model; it has been used to guess the posture
assumed by the person sitting on the armchair basing on this
raw and simple information. Rules of possible movements
between parts and the information of the centroid at each time Figure 5. Centroid position and the armchair
instant can be fit to define a possible posture on the armchair
[6].

I
Figure 3. Armchair legs with sensor and Bluetooth unit
Figure 6. The derivative modulus of the complex centroid signal; peaks are
evidence of the postural changes
At each time, the centroid position is computed and a
complex signal has been constructed representative of the (x,
 V. PRELIMINAR RESULTS AND CONCLUSION
In a preliminary test, the four sensors are placed under the
armchair feet as shown in figure 3. One of the authors, male
adult about 95 kg weight, spent 3 hours on the armchair (45
kg) watching television. According to [11], the weight is
distributed, most of the time, between right and left
symmetrically, in such a form that 70% of it is on the rear ( of
the armchair ) and 30% on the front. This fact is to be ascribed
to the presence of the trunk and the back of the armchair in the
rear of the armchair itself. The total weight measured by the
sensors is about the weight of the chair plus the weight of the
person during the slow movements, with no postural changes
- trunk and arms remained to the rear armchair, no significant
changes are observed in weight distribution. A moderate
right/left change in weight distribution has been observed. A
significant change is present when the person gets up from the
armchair: a sudden change from rear to front feet distribution
and an extra measurement on the front feet are present.
The strong relationship between posture and the patient
status has been confirmed by the medical doctors and nurses
in a small retirement home in Taranto (Fondazione Beato
Nunzio Sulprizio). Preliminary results of the estimated
postures adhere somehow to the real ones, showing the
feasibility of the proposed approach [5]. Future developments
of the proposed technique will address the definition of an
intelligent system able to describe the activity class, among
certain knowledge as possible, (hands shaking, legs
movements, rapid and frequent changes of position and so on).
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