The HELICOPTER project: Wireless sensor network for multi-user behavioral monitoring

Continuous monitoring of daily life activities within the home environment is among most appealing and challenging goals of technologies supporting the Active and Assisted Living paradigm. The HELICOPTER (AAL-JP) project aims at merging conventional telemedicine and home monitoring into a unique, holistic framework. To this purpose, a network of heterogeneous sensors is deployed into the user's home: raw data coming from sensors should then be gathered and analyzed to extract meaningful information, possibly related to user's health and wellness. Besides the inherent complexity of designing and deploying a suitable infrastructure, intrusiveness, usability and acceptability concern come into play. In this paper, we introduce the overall project vision, focusing mostly on the infrastructure implementation and discussing the extension of the monitoring approach to a multi-user environment. In fact, if two or more persons live in the same environment, data coming from home sensors need disambiguation, i.e., the activity detected by a given sensor need to be ascribed to a specific user, in order to contribute to the appropriate behavioral profile. We propose a simple approach, based on fusion of data coming from wearable and home devices. We discuss lab tests, showing good accuracy in “action tagging”, and illustrate practical results coming from actual pilots, involving older end-users in different European countries.