Monitoring of physical activities is a growing field with many diverse applications in the area of Ambient Assisted Living, ranging from medical screening, disorder diagnosis, rehabilitation, to well-being. A balanced physical activity is essential for “well aging”, and represents a fundamental indicator of good health and life quality.
Physical Activity Monitoring for Aging People
Overview
Monitoring of physical activities is a growing field with many diverse applications in the area of Ambient Assisted Living, ranging from medical screening, disorder diagnosis, rehabilitation, to well-being. A balanced physical activity is essential for “well aging”, and represents a fundamental indicator of good health and life quality. It is well-known that physical activity plays a positive role against Chronic Conditions, and more precisely, stimulates the immune system, decreases depressive state, reduces muscle loosening, activates the bone remodelling, and reduces the risk of cardiovascular diseases. Moreover, it is an excellent factor for the functional rehabilitation process. In advanced clinical cases, physical activity becomes vital, and patients must, for example, walk or change their posture in bed at regular time intervals.
The PAMAP-system represents an unobtrusive and fully mobile system that enables the accurate monitoring of the physical activities of aging people. The system bases on a set of tiny MEMS sensor units and corresponding software for professional and private use. It relies on a sound biomechanical model of the human body, and accurately measures the motion and efforts of the upper and lower limbs, thanks to appropriate parameterization. The system is usable indoors and outdoors, and enables monitoring of users during their daily activities. It is modular and covers a bunch of applications ranging from well-being to patient monitoring. Significant efforts has been put not only on the usability and acceptance of the devices itself, but also on the User Interface that will, in an entertaining and motivating way, accompany the user during the day, and enable reviewing and sharing of the recorded activity measurements with physicians, family members, or friends, for medical supervision or private purposes.
System overview
The concept of the PAMAP system consists in a decentralised architecture and set of services communicating together (Figure 1). It has the advantage of fast adaptability to new components and simple maintenance and deployment.
Figure 1: Overall architecture and components of the PAMAP system
The recorded sensor data is processed and visualised in an intuitive and appealing way in order to encourage the use of the PAMAP system. The analysis takes place on a familiar device – the home TV, to which the PAMAP mobile computing unit can be connected. The interaction is carried out through the remote control and different views of the activity analysis will be presented. As in Games, we will use 3d interactive graphics and give scores to involve the user in the process of the analysis.