Hot Topic: Consumer Electronics

Since 2005, IEEE Fellow Marjorie Skubic, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and her team of researchers have been deploying—in seniors’ residences at an “aging in place” facility—networks of motion sensors, bed sensors, and, most recently, video sensors, with the goal of developing software algorithms that can help to identify early signs of illness and promote early intervention.

As a person ages, Skubic explains, his/her health and functional ability tend to decline in a stair-step process, staying constant on a “plateau” until a dramatic health event or illness causes a decline to a lower plateau, and so on. By using specially developed algorithms to analyze the data from the sensors, Skubic says she aims to come up with a way to predict the moment of decline to the lower plateau. This may allow the length of each plateau—the period of stasis before a new decline in health—to be extended, and the steepness of the next decline to be reduced.

Skubic’s work is unique because of its integration of ordinary consumer electronics to incorporate sophisticated “computer vision” in the predictive analysis. She and her team use a pair of networked, consumer-grade Webcams, together with proprietary gait analysis software, to study the silhouettes of residents and detect falls.

Of course, Skubic’s is not the only research team developing new technology to promote healthy aging. The field has garnered attention and gained momentum worldwide, she notes, pointing to similar research initiatives overseas. These include The Enable Project, a European Union collaboration by researchers in Finland, Lithuania, Norway and the U.K., aimed at helping people with mild to moderate dementia maintain normal lives.

Ultimately, Skubic says she would like to see her work used as the basis for aging-in-place and home health remote monitoring products and services suitable for private homes. Yet while she remains optimistic that this eventually will occur, she acknowledges that it’s more likely these will emerge in assisted living centers first.