Benefits of automatic human action recognition in an assistive system for people with dementia

In the context of Activities of Daily Living, a human action can be defined as any interaction between an individual and his or her environment during a task (e.g., to use the soap during handwashing). When an assistive system is designed to recall users what to do during a task, one of its goals is to properly track and detect their actions in order to provide accurate guidance. This paper describes a k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) based Action Recognition System (ARS) for use in COACH, which is an assistive technology designed for people with dementia. The kNN-based ARS is able to recognize 6 main actions related to the handwashing task. The recognition is done in real-time and uses continuous sequences of discrete hand positions output by a handtracker. The aims of this new ARS are (1) to verify the benefits of enabling automatic human action recognition in COACH, (2) to evaluate its ability to overcome the limitations experienced during previous clinical trials.