Summary
Background: Monitoring and evaluation of Activities of Daily Living in general, and dressing
activity in particular, is an important indicator in the evaluation of the overall
cognitive state of patients. In addition, the effectiveness of therapy in patients
with motor impairments caused by a stroke, for example, can be measured through long-term
monitoring of dressing activity. However, automatic monitoring of dressing activity
has not received significant attention in the current literature.
Objectives: Considering the importance of monitoring dressing activity, the main goal of this
work was to investigate the possibility of recognizing dressing activities and automatically
identifying common failures exhibited by patients suffering from motor or cognitive
impairments.
Methods: The system developed for this purpose comprised analysis of RFID (radio frequency
identification) tracking and computer vision processing. Eleven test subjects, not
connected to the research, were recruited and asked to perform the dressing task by
choosing any combination of clothes without further assistance. Initially the test
subjects performed correct dressing and then they were free to choose from a set of
dressing failures identified from the current research literature.
Results: The developed system was capable of automatically recognizing common dressing failures.
In total, there were four dressing failures observed for upper garments and three
failures for lower garments, in addition to recognizing successful dressing. The recognition
rate for identified dressing failures was between 80% and 100%.
Conclusions: We developed a robust system to monitor the dressing activity. Given the importance
of monitoring the dressing activity as an indicator of both cognitive and motor skills
the system allows for the possibility of long term tracking and continuous evaluation
of the dressing task. Long term monitoring can be used in rehabilitation and cognitive
skills evaluation.
Keywords
Pervasive healthcare - monitoring activities of daily living (ADL) - assessing dressing
activity