UCLA

Ubiquitous personal monitoring of health has rapidly developed in recent years. Technology is playing a major role in the improvement of quality of life. Much of the total expense on healthcare is attributed to chronic illnesses and a large portion can be eliminated through continuous personal monitoring solutions. While pervasive technologies are available now, they need to be as unobtrusive as possible and require as little human intervention as possible. Broad ranges of electronic devices will monitor the human condition and create alert notifications to the individual or care providers.

One new modality in this world of technological advances that can provide major benefit, is a pressure sensitive bedsheet. The resulting pressure images can be analyzed to ascertain information about the person lying on the bed. Questions can be asked, such as what posture is the person sleeping in, or what movement is there? Can we identify and track bodyparts? Can respiration and vital signs be measured? What medical conditions can be detected?

This work investigates some of these questions and contains various methods of analyses through static images and dynamic sequences of motion. Furthermore, methods of sampling strategies are presented with the aim of optimizing the data flow. This work introduces this current research to achieve the aim of continuous personal monitoring using pressure sensitive material.