Monitoring Activities of Daily Living with a Mobile App and Bluetooth Beacons

Abstract

In this paper, we present a preliminary study on the monitoring of activities of daily living (ADL) with a mobile app. We rely on a set of Bluetooth beacons deployed around the household to perform indoor localization. The mobile app also tracks the instrumental ADL (IADL) in terms of the app usage, such as apps for social networking, financial management, and personal entertainment. Furthermore, the mobile app collects information regarding the level of physical activities and the environment such as light, temperature, air pressure using the built-in sensors of the smartphone. The latter could help infer the living conditions of the individual, even though the information is not directly about ADL. Tracking ADL in any method will inevitably intrude on the user's privacy. Our mobile app informs the user exactly what information we collect and all the data are stored locally on the smartphone. The user can view the report of the individual's ADL, and has the choice of deleting some or all data. Finally, we propose a feature extraction model for temporal ADL data and demonstrate how the features can be used to classify different behavioral patterns.