Automated walking aid detector based on indoor video recordings

Due to the rapidly aging population, developing automated home care systems is a very important step in taking care of elderly people. This will enable us to automatically monitor the health of senior citizens in their own living environment and prevent problems before they happen. One of the challenging tasks is to actively monitor walking habits of elderlies, who alternate between the use of different walking aids, and to combine this with automated fall risk assessment systems. We propose a camera based system that uses object categorization techniques to robustly detect walking aids, like a walker, in order to improve the classification of the fall risk. By automatically integrating the application specific scenery knowledge like camera position and used walker type, we succeed in detecting walking aids within a single frame with an accuracy of 68% for trajectory A and 38% for trajectory B. Furthermore, compared to current state of the art detection systems, we use a rather limited set of training data to achieve this accuracy and thus create a system that is easily adaptable for other applications. Moreover, we applied spatial constraints between detections to optimize the object detection output and to limit the amount of false positive detections. Finally, we evaluate the output on a walking sequence base, leading up to a 92.3% correct classification rate of walking sequences. It can be noted that adapting this approach to other walking aids, like a walking cane, is quite straightforward and opens up the door for many future applications.