Elderly care notification system using hand posture recognition

This paper proposes a hand posture recognition as an assistive tool for elderly care. The system uses Haar-like feature, Principle Component Analysis (PCA), and simulation web server for detection, recognition, and alert by order. Our system interprets the hand sign captured by web camera and alerts a caregiver via smart phone. Besides, a caregiver can also periodically check needs of an elder from a smart phone. So a caregiver can do other tasks more efficiently because he/she need not to be with an elder at all times. The empirical results show satisfactory performance of PCA and contour detection with hand posture recognition.