A research on automatic power control of intelligent appliances for dementia patients

Recently, elders who are called dementia patients have increased and it causes also increasing of accidents due to their symptom. In our research, we focus on accidents due to their forgetting to turn off an appliance which is typical symptom and we propose a method of determining a situation of a room for preventing accidents and turning off appliances automatically. An important issue in recognizing the situation is the correct estimation of the number of dementia patients and healthy people are in the room because absence of healthy people and leaving only a dementia patient causes such an accident. Our proposed method can estimate the number of people and distinguish healthy people from dementia patients. To realize this, we picked up two features from data from IR (InfraRed) sensor and decided an RFID to distinguish between dementia patients and healthy people. In experiments, we evaluated the capability of the proposed method for counting the number of people.