Water Flow Detection in a Handwashing Task

Older adults suffering from Alzheimer´s disease often require assistance with performing simple activities of daily living, such as washing their hands in the bathroom. This severely limits their independence and places a heavy care giving burden on their family and the healthcare system. The motivation for developing a water detection algorithm is for it to be used within a system that provides reminding prompts for Alzheimer´s sufferers and to study product usability for older adults with cognitive impairments. Water detection in a video sequence poses a challenging computer vision problem since it is difficult to model the flow of water in a structured manner. A real-time detection system is presented here that estimates the presence of flowing water in a bathroom sink during a hand washing task based on classifying video and audio features with an overall accuracy of 88.76%. Visual features are extracted using temporal image derivatives and hand tracking is used to enhance the robustness in the visual features.