Medical remote monitoring using sound environment analysis and wearable sensors

Dan Istrate (1) , Jérôme Boudy (2) , Hamid Medjahed (2) , Jean-Louis Baldinger (2)

1 LRIT - Laboratoire de Recherche et d'Innovation Technologique (ESIGETEL)
2 TSP - EPH - Département Electronique et Physique

The elderly living at home are in most of the cases (concerning Western and Central Europe and North America) living alone and with an increased risk of accidents. In France, about 4.5 % of men and 8.9% of women aged of 65+ years has an everyday life accident . Between these everyday life accidents, the most important part is represented by the domestic accidents; about 61% (same source) and 54% of them take place inside the house. In France, annually, 2 millions of elderly falls take place, which represent the source of 10 000 deaths . Between 30% and 55% of falls cause bruises and only 3% to 13% of falls are the causes of serious injuries such as fractures, dislocation of a joint, or wounds. Apart from physical injury and hospitalization, a fall can cause a shock (especially if the person cannot recover only after the fall). This condition can seriously affect the senior psychology, he might looses the confidence in his abilities and can result in a limitation of daily activities and, consequently, in a decrease of the life quality. In order to improve the quality of life of elderly several applications has been developed: home telemonitoring in order to detect distress situations and audio-video transmission in order to allow specialists to diagnose patient at distance. This chapter describe a medical remote monitoring solution allowing the elderly people to live at home in safety

Mots clés: Sound environment analysis; Fall detection; Vital signals sensors; Remote monitoring for elderly people

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Dan Istrate, Jérôme Boudy, Hamid Medjahed, Jean-Louis Baldinger. Medical remote monitoring using sound environment analysis and wearable sensors. Biomedical engineering, IN-TECH, pp.517 - 532, 2009, 978-953-307-013-1. ⟨hal-00473858⟩