A survey of human location estimation in a home environment

In recent years, much effort has been made to provide services to an elderly person living alone at home. An essential component of facilitating the person is to identify his location in the home environment. Fundamentally, three different methods are being focused by the research community to address the issue of localizing the person. Most common approach is to install a variety of sensor systems in the home environment to track and monitor the person. Another variant includes developing wearable sensors that an elderly person carries with him all the time for being able to be tracked. A more recent approach, that is still under development, is to use an autonomous mobile robot in home environments to determine the location of the person. This paper attempts to summarize these efforts and provides directions for future research in finding the person in the home environment.