Monitoring health and wellbeing of seniors using unintrusive sensors

Caring for the elderly is a growing challenge for Australian society. This project addresses concerns regarding the wellbeing of seniors living at home by modeling their daily routines to detect significant changes due to functional decline or the onset of illness. The project will employ data provided by a partner company in the aged-care sector. If successful, the resultant models will be integrated into a personalized in-home monitoring system that also detects instantaneous adverse events, such as falls, and decides how to communicate with seniors and carers to deliver information and alerts. The effectiveness and acceptance of these technologies will be evaluated on a diverse population of seniors and carers.

Specific activities are:

• Model the contribution of novel sensors to the identification of user behaviour.
• Simulate the behaviour of users with medical conditions on the basis of the behaviour of healthy users combined with medical information.
• Devise computational models for the automatic, continuous assessment of key indicators of functional decline and the onset of medical conditions.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of our computational models, sensor configuration, and reporting and alerting procedures.

Possible extensions involve devising decision procedures to determine how the system should communicate with seniors and carers.

The successful applicant will initially receive a scholarship. Upon receipt of a Monash scholarship, a top-up will be considered, depending on performance.