Automated activity recognition and monitoring of elderly using wireless sensors: Research challenges

A rapidly growing aging population presents many challenges to health and aged care services around the world. Recognising and understanding the activities performed by elderly is an important research area that has the potential to address these challenges and healthcare needs of the 21
^st
century by enabling a wide range of valuable applications such as remote health monitoring. A key enabling technology for such applications is wireless sensors. However we must first overcome a number of challenges that are technological, social and economic, before being able to realize such applications using pervasive technologies.