Unobtrusive Monitoring of Physical Activity in AAL. A Simple Wearable Device Designed for Older Adults

Many solutions and projects proposed within the Ambient Assisted Living research area, aim at monitoring the degree of vitality of elderly users in their daily activities, and in their home environment, to possibly avoid or strongly limit the need for clinical evaluations. In fact, the information on the subject’s vitality, manifested through his/her activity profile, may be used to evaluate possible anomalous trends, related to cognitive or physical decay. For such a kind of analysis to be realistically affordable, the monitoring device shall be unobtrusive, and transparent to the user. With the aim of striving for the simplest and most reliable design compatible with the aforementioned requirements, this paper presents a wearable device equipped with a sensing insole hosting force sensors, and the related electronics for signal processing and data transmission. The device locally classifies different dynamic states (sitting, walking, standing) and transmits the corresponding information to a supervising system. Preliminary experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the approach, in correctly detecting and classifying the user’s activities.