Fujitsu today announced the development of a technology that uses a camera to accurately recognize the status of patients, detecting activities such as sitting up in bed, getting out of bed, or moving in bed. There are instances in which patients in hospitals or care facilities get out of bed to walk around without nurses realizing it, then slipping and falling. They may also be in too much pain to sleep, which nurses might be late to recognize. An existing technique that uses sensors to detect the pressure of bodyweight does not always work well, giving a false alarm response to a patient just turning over while sleeping. Therefore it requires nurses to make frequent checks. Fujitsu has developed a technology that recognizes and tracks the patient’s head with a camera, accurately recognizing when the patient sits up or gets out of bed, and also a technology that visualizes patient behavior that demands a nurse’s attention. These technologies help hospitals and care facilities provide a high level of patient protection while lightening the workload on nurses.
The technology categorizes the state of a patient in bed into five categories depending on posture, and has defined a state-transition diagram that relates them. The appearance of the patient’s head depends on which state the patient is in, so Fujitsu Laboratories defined the head detection area for each state, and generated learned data limited to the appearance of the head in those positions (such as orientation and size). The recognition process also uses learned data where the next likely states are limited by the current state, based on the state-transition diagram. Selecting the learned data used in the recognition process in response to the patient’s state results in highly accurate head recognition.
