An RF-ID based solution of Assistive Technology for User Activity Monitoring

The population ageing is increasing the incidence of serious health issues and solutions are needed to reduce the costs of health and social care. Among the challenges falls, nutrition and hydration are gaining ground. From the falls point of view, exercise can improve older peoples balance but, to provide a measure of the amount of exercise performed, low-cost wearable devices, estimating the users mobility and the activity rates, needs to be used. Poor nutrition and hydration also contribute to increasing the probability to incur in a mobility decline with consequent augmented fatigue and dependency. Technology plays an important part in increasing awareness or providing constant reminders to eat and drink regularly. These solutions allow monitoring deviations from normal patterns of behaviour, which might indicate nutrition or dehydration scarcity thus enabling the possibility to provide reminders to users and caregivers. To fill this need, in this paper, an RF-ID based system meant to monitor user's habits, such as the use of food/beverage/drugs, uses of equipment, exploitation of the indoor environment and the activity rate, is presented. The solution proposed aims to asses the RF-ID measurement system developed as a function of the reading range and the reader power output. Moreover, the system has been further assessed by computing Specificity, S_p and Sensitivity, S_e, thus allowing to find the minimal inter-object distance that guarantees exclusive discrimination of the object. Main advantages are related to the low invasivity and flexibility and robustness to a non-static position of tools/appliances to be monitored.