Pose Identification for Task Recognition in Care Work

In Japan, the number of caregivers is not increasing with the same rate as the aging of the population, resulting in an increased workload per caregiver, which has become a social issue. In response, information and communication technology has been introduced to support caregivers, but the tasks it can support are currently limited. In addition, caregivers are subjected to a variety of events and conditions at the work site, which results in a heavy cognitive burden, even on skilled caregivers. To solve this problem, we develop a system to support caregivers, reduce their burden, and improve work efficiency, by observing caregivers and patients using intelligent space. First, it is necessary to understand the caregiver’s tasks in detail. In this paper, we propose a task recognition method based on the recognition of poses from images captured by a camera. Moreover, we investigated alternatives to improve the results of the method. Our experiments indicated that the method can recognize the caregiver’s pose with 96.9% accuracy, and we successfully solved the problem of insufficient training data.