Multi Person Identification and Localization in Pervasive Assistive Environments

Tracking the location of a user is considered to be the most fundamental step for creating a context aware application such as activity monitoring in an assistive environment. The problem becomes very challenging, if the number of people involved in the scenario is larger than one. The reason is that any multi-person environment such as a hospital demands a simultaneous identification and localization mechanism, thus making the system extremely complex. In this paper, we present a novel, less-intrusive system that uses RFID and a Kinect sensor deployed at various locations of an assistive apartment to continuously track and identify every person in a multi-person assistive environment. The system maps the identification events from the RFID to the location information from the Kinect sensor using two approaches: 1) proximity-based and 2) classification-based. We evaluate our system for both approaches in a real world scenario. Our result shows great prospect of using the RFID and Kinect sensors jointly to solve the simultaneous tracking and identification problem.