SPHERE in a Box: Practical and Scalable EurValve Activity Monitoring Smart Home Kit

Non-invasive, environmental monitoring is being successfully utilised to improve health care outcomes for patients while allowing them to more safely and comfortably live in their homes instead of health care facilities. This promises to reduce costs and ease the health care burden for many countries globally. However, these systems are still in early stages of research and only highly skilled researchers and engineers can successfully deploy them. The difficulty in deploying these systems prevents their mass use and potential cost savings motivating research interest in smart homes in a box (SHiB). In this paper we present the EurValve Activity Monitoring Kit, a minimalist activity monitoring system that can be deployed in a home by the patient and still obtain valuable lifestyle and activity level information for medical clinicians. We describe the design of the system and how it is being used in the H2020 EurValve Project. The initial results show that the system is easily deployed and yet still effective for non-invasive sensing for activity classification and localisation.