A wearable sensing framework for improving personal and oral hygiene for people with developmental disabilities

People with developmental disabilities often face difficulties in coping with daily activities and many require constant support. One of the major health issues for people with developmental disabilities is personal hygiene. Many lack the ability, poor memory or lack of attention to carry out normal daily activities like brushing teeth and washing hands. Poor personal hygiene may result in increased susceptibility to infection and other health issues. To enable independent living and improve the quality of care for people with developmental abilities, this paper proposes a new wearable sensing framework to monitoring personal hygiene. Based on a smartwatch, this framework is designed as a pervasive monitoring and learning tool to provide detailed evaluation and feedback to the user on hand washing and tooth brushing. A preliminary study was conducted to assess the performance of the approach, and the results showed the reliability and robustness of the framework in quantifying and assessing hand washing and tooth brushing activities.