Abstract
This paper focuses on the care support of elderly persons in a superaging society, and describes a proposed sleep-monitoring agent and its use to ensure the comfortable and healthy life of aged persons. A sleep-monitoring agent is provided to each aged person to estimate his/her sleep stage from heartbeat and body movement data acquired by an unconstrained-type sensor. The obtained information is remotely displayed in the tablets and/or PCs of care workers and informs them when an aged person sleepwalks or falls from his/her bed. In this paper, we introduce the sleep-monitoring agent and its system, and describe a new sleep-stage estimation method in detail. This paper also provides the results of experiments on human subjects, which show the effectiveness of the sleep-monitoring agent. Finally, future works are summarized.
