Monitoring of activity levels of the elderly in home and community environments using off the shelf cellular handsets

Numerous laboratory based studies have been reported on the use of accelerometry for gait and activity analysis. A drawback of such studies is the use of custom hardware platforms worn by subjects. This paper introduces a system solely utilising accelerometers embedded in off-the-shelf cellular handsets which allow medical professionals and caregivers to remotely monitor the activity characteristics of elderly patients in the home or in the community. The use of ubiquitous cellular handsets makes the system far more acceptable to patients and enables use of the system to be extended beyond primary health-care facilities into the home environment. Mobile handset power consumption issues and other relevant handset characteristics for a variety of different COTS handsets are investigated in the context of deploying this system.