Monitoring activity of taking medicine by incorporating RFID and video analysis

In this paper, we present a new framework to monitor medication intake for elderly individuals by incorporating a video camera and radio frequency identification (RFID) sensors. The proposed framework can provide a key function for monitoring activities of daily living (ADLs) of elderly people at their own home. In an assistive environment, RFID tags are applied on medicine bottles located in a medicine cabinet so that each medicine bottle will have a unique ID. The description of the medicine data for each tag is manually input to a database. RFID readers will detect if any of these bottles are taken away from the medicine cabinet and identify the tag attached on the medicine bottle. A video camera is installed to continue monitoring the activity of taking medicine by integrating face detection and tracking, mouth detection, background subtraction, and activity detection. The preliminary results demonstrate that 100 % detection accuracy for identifying medicine bottles and promising results for monitoring activity of taking medicine.