Kinect sensor-based interaction monitoring system using the BLSTM neural network in healthcare

Remote monitoring of patients is considered as one of the reliable alternatives to healthcare solutions for elderly and/or chronically ill patients. Further, monitoring interaction with people plays an important role in diagnosis and in managing patients that are suffering from mental illnesses, such as depression and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In this paper, we propose the Kinect sensor-based interaction monitoring system between two persons using the Bidirectional long short-term memory neural network (BLSTM-NN). Such model can be adopted for the rehabilitation of people (who may be suffering from ASD and other psychological disorders) by analyzing their activities. Medical professionals and caregivers for diagnosing and remotely monitoring the patients suffering from such psychological disorders can use the system. In our study, ten volunteers were involved to create five interactive groups to perform continuous activities, where the Kinect sensor was used to record data. A set of continuous activities was created using random combinations of 24 isolated activities. 3D skeleton of each user was detected and tracked using the Kinect and modeled using BLSTM-NN. We have used a lexicon by analyzing the constraints while performing continuous activities to improve the performance of the system. We have achieved the maximum accuracy of 70.72%. Our results outperformed the previously reported results and therefore the proposed system can further be used in developing internet of things (IoT) Kinect sensor-based healthcare application.