Where Are You When the Accident Happens? Portable Standing Assistance Product Design in Application of Kinect? Body Detection Technology Alarming Elderly Home Accident

Populations are aging faster and elderly is recently reached 11%. The old age issues are getting more urgent. Most of the elderly are self-sustaining and able to live alone although they are not as nimble as younger people. However, they tend to have higher risk in accident occurrence. Unexpectative accidents such as fall, stroke and faint are usually discovered with delay on which the prime time for treatment has passed. Survivor of the accidents always suffers from sequela, decreased living quality and even uses up the medical resources. Thus, many researches are devoted in health care and accident prevention as early treatment is found better enhancing the condition. Generally, the pre-accident behavior is different from normality. These could be used as reference for determining an alarm. Recording the behavior could be also helpful for diagnosis and medication. To this point, products has been developed to which the house needed to be installed with many cameras. However, the precision of behavior detection is still unstable and the technical threshold is still high, it is still not very popularized in the world. Recently, Microsoft has released Kinect™ technology, game accessory, which can be effectively detect human body posture. With matured software development, Microsoft also released a Software Development Kit (SDK) for developers. The efficient hardware and low cost software has lower the entry; therefore, it is selected as the core of this project. We expect to apply Kinect™ in assistance tool design which monitors elderly’ s behavior. Standing on the point of care, the outcome connects familyship through less worries to each other.

Project ID:PB10110-0036
External Project ID:NSC101-2218-E182-010