ML-Based Edge Node for Monitoring Peoples’ Frailty Status

Abstract

The development of contactless methods to assess the degree of personal hygiene in elderly people is crucial for detecting frailty and providing early intervention to prevent complete loss of autonomy, cognitive impairment, and hospitalisation. The unobtrusive nature of the technology is essential in the context of maintaining good quality of life. The use of cameras and edge computing with sensors provides a way of monitoring subjects without interrupting their normal routines, and has the advantages of local data processing and improved privacy. This work describes the development an intelligent system that takes the RGB frames of a video as input to classify the occurrence of brushing teeth, washing hands, and fixing hair. No action activity is considered. The RGB frames are first processed by two Mediapipe algorithms to extract body keypoints related to the pose and hands, which represent the features to be classified. The optimal feature extractor results from the most complex Mediapipe pose estimator combined with the most complex hand keypoint regressor, which achieves the best performance even when operating at one frame per second. The final classifier is a Light Gradient Boosting Machine classifier that achieves more than 94% weighted F1-score under conditions of one frame per second and observation times of seven seconds or more. When the observation window is enlarged to ten seconds, the F1-scores for each class oscillate between 94.66% and 96.35%.