UWB Indoor Location for Monitoring Dementia Patients

Monitoring the activities of daily living is a common form of assessing the progression of dementia. Yet so far, this mostly can only be done by visual observations, which is time and cost expensive and therefore only done on a short scale. Even though the technology for automatic monitoring exists, it is still seldom used in real life environments. Key problems are the effort involved in sensor deployment and the extraction of relevant activity information from simple sensor data. In the following article the authors describe a long-term real-life monitoring of dementia patients using an easy to deploy UWB-location system. The authors describe the system-concept, discuss practical deployment and maintenance experience, and present monitoring results.