SmartMind: Activity Tracking and Monitoring for Patients with Alzheimer's Disease

In this paper, we introduce SmartMind, an activity tracking and monitoring system to help Alzheimer's diseases (AD) patients to live independently within their living rooms while providing emergent help and support when necessary. Allowing AD patients to handle their daily activities not only can release some of the burdens on their families and caregivers, but also is highly important to help them regain confidence towards a healthy life and reduce the degeneration rates of their memories. The daily activities of a patient captured from SmartMind can also serve as important indicators to describe his/her normal living habit (NLH). By checking with NLH, the patient's current health status can be estimated on a daily basis.

I. Introduction

With rapid advances in sensing and wireless communication technologies, the design and development of novel pervasive healthcare services have attracted tremendous interests both in academia and industry. Through sensing devices, e.g., heart-beat and movement sensors, various health and activity data about the users can easily be captured in a continuous manner. By analyzing these health and activity data, novel pervasive and smart healthcare services can be provided to them [10], [11], [7], [12], [2]. In this paper, we study how to provide effective monitoring and tracking services on the daily activities of the patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) [9], [1].