Abstract
Computers become smaller and cheaper from day to day, and the utilization, as daily life equipments, is now becoming ubiquitous. Therefore, it's essential to discuss the development of applications, as well as the installation of ubiquitous computing technologies into our daily living environments. Based on this idea, in order to investigate how ubiquitous computing can be used in the most efficient way, an experimental house, Ocha House, has been constructed in the campus of Ochanomizu university in 2009. In this study, we described the feature of the design of the experimental house and proposed a non-invasive gait monitoring technique as a healthcare application. Specifically, five wireless accelerometers were fixed on the floor of the house, and the floor vibration was measured when the subject walked along the accelerometers. As a result, the floor acceleration intensity was found to surge at the ground contact, and the gait cycle could be detected. By combining the simple acceleration sensors and the housing structures, human motion monitoring would become less invasive.
