RFWash: a weakly supervised tracking of hand hygiene technique

Each year, hundreds of thousands of people contract Healthcare Associated Infections (HAIs). Poor hand hygiene compliance among healthcare workers is thought to be the leading cause of HAIs and methods were developed to measure compliance. Surprisingly, human observation is still considered the gold standard for measuring compliance by World Health Organization (WHO). Moreover, no automated solutions exist for monitoring hand hygiene techniques, such as "how to hand rub" technique by WHO. In this paper, we introduce RFWash; the first radio-based device-free system for monitoring Hand Hygiene (HH) technique. On the technical level, HH gestures are performed back-to-back in a continuous sequence and pose a significant challenge to conventional two-stage gesture detection and recognition approaches. We propose a deep model that can be trained on unsegmented naturally-performed HH gesture sequences. RFWash evaluation demonstrates promising results for tracking HH gestures, achieving gesture error rate of < 8% when trained on 10-second segments, which reduces manual labelling overhead by ≈ 67% compared to fully supervised approach. The work is a step towards practical RF sensing that can reliably operate inside future healthcare facilities.