Rich contextual information for monitoring the elderly in an early stage of cognitive impairment.

With the increase in the elderly population, there is a concomitant growth in the number of cases of cognitive impairment. The early stages of these disorders can cause the elderly difficulties in performing their daily activities. To improve their independence while keeping their caregivers informed, this paper presents a monitoring system that focuses on the use of rich contextual information to detect a wide variety of a cognitively impaired person's routines and deviations from those routines. A detailed architecture of the system is presented together with an in-depth description of the algorithms for the identification of routines and deviations. In an experimental test with students, the algorithms identified some 91% of the routines and some 96% of the deviations.