Care: context awareness in residences for elderly

In this paper we present a system that is able to monitor activities of people in a domestic environment. The application area is that of ambient assisted living . Because of the increasing number of elderly living at home and the foreseen shortage in the number of caregivers, remote ICT- based applications will have to be developed. One o f the tasks of such systems is to monitor elderly in their abil ity to perform the activities of daily living (ADL). We dev eloped a system consisting of a low-power, low bandwidth wireless sensor network, incorporating simple switch sensors. As a pilot the system was installed in the apartment of an elderly lady. The data were partly annotated by the woman self. We developed a pattern recognition method based on probabilistic models. The detected clusters compare well with the labels of the annotation.