Abstract
In the near future as a serious aging society, we will have more medical and nursing care problems for old people. As one means such a problems solves, we would like to propose a novel system using high quality combination sensors to bed monitoring technology. As an important example of such support, a QOL (Quality of life) monitoring system for aged people and patient are proposed for helper request. We originally developed plate shaped sensors and pillow sensor using piezoelectric elements and 3-dimension accelerometer. Existing sensors such as clip sensors or mat sensors require restraint of patients. Moreover, these sensors present privacy problems. The features of our sensors are that they require no power supply or patient restraint. We evaluated our system using a basic experiment to predict seven behavior patterns. We obtained a result of predicted behavior patterns related to bed-leaving using only six sensors installed under a bed or pillow sensor on a bed. Especially, our system can correctly detect behavior patterns of lateral sitting, which is a position that occurs when a patient tries to leave from the bed, and terminal sitting, which is the position immediately before bed-leaving. They were discerned from other behavior patterns.
