An Ambient Approach to Emergency Detection Based on Location Tracking

In previous works overall activity and inactivity levels of users living in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) enabled flats were determined using standard home automation sensors. The flats are regular dwellings for long-term use by approximately 30 tenants located in Kaiserslautern, Germany. In this real-world AAL project(1) it was shown that basic inactivity alarms based on linear thresholds can be triggered within 30 to 180 minutes after the occurrence of a potential emergency. However, inactivity alarms are somewhat coarse and do not make full use of additional information inherent in the raw sensor data: spatial and temporal information regarding the location of a tenant in their flat and the time spent in a room. Using that information, it can be determined in which room a tenant has resided for how long at a given time. Hence, in this paper a method for location tracking is proposed, forming a novel alarming criterion.