Privacy-Preserving In-Bed Pose and Posture Tracking on Edge

In-bed behavior monitoring is commonly needed for bed-bound patient and has long been confined to wearable devices or expensive pressure mapping systems. Meanwhile, vision-based human pose and posture tracking while experiencing a lot of attention/success in the computer vision field has been hindered in terms of usability for in-bed cases, due to huge privacy concerns surrounding this topic. Moreover, the inference models for mainstream pose and posture estimation often require excessive computing resources, impeding their implementation on edge devices. In this paper, we introduce a privacy-preserving in-bed pose and posture tracking system running entirely on an edge device with added functionality to detect stable motion as well as setting user-specific alerts for given poses. We evaluated the estimation accuracy of our system on a series of retrospective infrared (LWIR) images as well as samples from a real-world test environment. Our test results reached over 93.6% estimation accuracy for in-bed poses and achieved over 95.9% accuracy in estimating three in-bed posture categories.