BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for monitoring activity capabilities of an individual, for example to determine the ability of an individual to perform activities of daily living.

DESCRIPTION OF THE PRIOR ART

The reference in this specification to any prior publication (or information derived from it), or to any matter which is known, is not, and should not be taken as an acknowledgment or admission or any form of suggestion that the prior publication (or information derived from it) or known matter forms part of the common general knowledge in the field of endeavour to which this specification relates.

Activity of Daily Living (ADL) has become the de facto clinical standard to assess the functional status of older people to be able live safely and independently in their home. Over past forty years, more than forty different ADL indexes have been developed to determine fundamental functional disability status of both patients and population. Measures of functional ability outlined by the ADL have become routine in the assessment of functional status of older people and believed to be a good predictor of a wide range of health-related behaviour in seniors.

Among them, the Katz ADL scale is a tool for assessing an older adult's ability to bathe, dress, use the toilet, transfer, remain continent, and feed her/himself. It's also used for evaluating changes in response to illness. The Katz index is easy to use and adaptable to most clinical assessment. ADL scales have also been widened to assessment that accommodate more sophisticated functional requirements full range of activities necessary for independent living such as ability to cope with financial transactions, neurological disorders and cognitive impairment prevalent with aging.

The current approach to measuring ADL is in a clinical setting prior to discharge from rehabilitation, for example by a clinician such as an occupational health therapist. In some cases, the discharge may be delayed (hence, increased length of stay) if modifications of the patient's home environment may be required to be done to adjust for their limited functional ability. Some form of ADL is also used in geriatric assessment for eligibility to residential care, which is again performed in a similar manner by a clinician or the like, in a clinical environment. However, this approach suffers from a number of drawbacks.

Firstly, it is not representative of an individual's living environment, and doesn't therefore necessarily take into account the individual's everyday living routines of activities. Secondly, it is subjective measure due to it being based on a clinical staff's observation and corresponding self-reported responses from the individual in question, and can therefore vary between assessors and individuals, meaning the outcomes are not objective or consistent. There is also evidence showing variations in ADL assessment, with results likely to be skewed by self-reported questions being interpreted differently due to individuals from various culture, language, and education backgrounds. Similar issues arise due to communication barriers from cognitive impairment having significant implications on achieving reliable ADL assessment. Thirdly, current assessments are clinically resource intensive, particularly from a home setting, making them impractical for long term care of the elderly or disabled populations. Fourthly, ADL can vary over time and therefore not practical to provide regular ADL assessment by a clinician.

Attempts have been made to implement sensing systems to reduce workload and provide more objective assessment. However, the majority of these systems still rely on assessment in a clinical setting and are not therefore reflective of actual typical activities performed by the individual. Additionally, such systems often rely on wearable sensors, which have the drawback of being intrusive and requiring compliance by the individual, for example in ensuring they wear the sensor. Other systems tend to focus on limited aspect of living, and do not objectively assess a complete range of tasks performed by the individual.

GB-2,352,815 describes an equipment monitor which is capable of learning how to respond to particular inputs (e.g. a neural network) is connected to a plurality of instruments (e.g. medical instruments in an intensive care ward or instruments in an industrial plant). During an initial training session, a human supervisor monitors the instruments to ensure that no potential alarm condition is encountered whilst the monitor assimilates the gamut of sensor data representative of “safe” or “healthy” conditions. Thereafter the equipment is left to sensor data an alarm if the collection of sensor data it is monitoring strays out of the range encountered during the training session. A button may be provided for indicating to the monitor that responses which give rise to false alarms should be included in its “safe” responses. The monitor may be provided with some rules prior to its learning phase.

However, this is focussed on fall detection and is not applicable more broadly to other aspects of activity capability assessment, or assessing a gradual decline in capabilities.

US2014/0281650 describes a passive monitoring system for use in a residential independent living framework. In some exemplary embodiments, the system may be used to alert a primary caregiver of a possible decline or change in an activity of daily living (“ADL”) of the monitored individual. The system may collect usage data associated with, for example, electrical devices at the living quarters of the monitored individual. The collected data may include data pairs of time samples and voltage data associated with one or more electrical devices that the monitored individual is expected to utilize. Applying various filters to the collected data, a possible decline or change in ADL of the monitored individual may be identified.

However, this system focusses only on electrical device usage and is not applicable more broadly to activities that do not use electrical devices, as is the case with many activities of daily living.

U.S. Pat. No. 8,810,388 relates to a system and method for monitoring the location, movement and health of one or more individuals within an environment by a monitoring individual, such as a care giver. The system used includes optional monitoring devices including a wireless transceiver, access point devices including a wireless transceiver, a hub access point device including a wireless transceiver, and a local computing device. The system is programmed such that it has the capability to operate with or without the measure of time of flight value from the optional monitoring devices such that the system has the capability of monitoring the location, movement and health of an individual whether or not the individual is wearing the monitoring device.

However, this system is limited to movement monitoring and provides no guidance regarding capability to perform activities more broadly.

U.S. Pat. No. 8,184,001 describes a wireless contextual prompting device that provides contextual (context-aware) prompting in the home for applications such as Activities of Daily Living (ADL) monitoring, medication adherence, journaling, social messaging and coaching. The device combines the advantages of a small, wireless, battery-operated sensor that may be easily mounted at critical places in a person's daily routine with a low-power, high-contrast display panel that may be palm sized. The context may be displayed on the display screen as images, icons and/or text such that it is easy to interpret warnings by the young, elderly, or the language-challenged.

However, this arrangement focusses on providing prompting to individual's to assist them with performing tasks, which in many cases is intrusive, and does not objectively assess the individual's ability to perform the task.

U.S. Pat. No. 8,798,573 describes a monitoring system capable of monitoring the Activities of Daily Living (ADL) of one or more persons occupying a building. The monitoring system includes an information handling system having a radio-frequency (RF) scanner capable of scanning the RF ambient environment of the building. When an individual uses devices in the building that emit RF sensor data or emissions, the RF sensor data are detected by the RF scanner and analyzed by the information handling system. The characteristics of the detected RF sensor data are compared to a database of signature of known devices. If a detected RF sensor data matches the signature of a known device, the use of the device is logged into a database for ADL analysis.

This suffers from the drawback of being solely focused on RF sensor data detection and provides limited ability to detect a wide range of activities.

US2005/0234310 describes a method and related system to, among other things, automatically infer answers to all of the ADL questions and the first four questions of the IADL in the home. The inference methods detect the relevant activities unobtrusively, continuously, accurately, objectively, quantifiably and without relying on the patient's own memory (which may be fading due to aging or an existing health condition, such as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)) or on a caregiver's subjective report. The methods rely on the judicious placement of a number of sensors in the subject's place of residence, including motion detection sensors in every room, the decomposition of each relevant activity into the sub-tasks involved, identification of additional sensors required to detect the relevant sub-tasks and spatial-temporal conditions between the sensor data of sensors to formulate the rules that will detect the occurrence of the specific activities of interest. The sensory data logged on a computing device (computer, data logger etc.), date and time stamped, is analyzed using specialist data analysis software tools that check for the applicable task/activity detection rules. The methods are particularly useful for the continued in-home assessment of subjects living alone to evaluate their progress in response to medical intervention drug or physical therapy or decline in abilities that may be the indicator of the onset of disease over time. Measuring the frequency of each activity, the time required to accomplish an activity or a subtask and the number of activities/subtasks performed continuously over time can add extremely valuable quantification extensions to the existing ADL and IADL evaluation instruments, as it will not only reveal important information setting up a baseline for activity levels for each activity, but will also easily allow the detection of any drift from these personalized norms.

However, this requires a rules based approach, which is complex and prone to error in the event that rules are not suitable for a given circumstance. Furthermore, the document only describes the use of yes/no answers in assessing specific limited activities, which provides limited feedback in terms of quantifying abilities of an individual, and health status more generally.

SUMMARY OF THE PRESENT INVENTION

In one broad form the present invention seeks to provide a method of monitoring activity capabilities of a subject, the method including, in at least one processing device:a) determining sensor data indicative of sensor readings for each of a plurality of sensors, the sensors being positioned within a living environment of the subject and the sensor data for each sensor being at least partially indicative of one or more activities performed by the subject;b) for each of a plurality of activity domains, determining a domain score indicative of a level of activity within the respective activity domain, the domain score being determined using sensor data from a respective combination of sensors associated with the respective domain;c) determining a reference activity level using reference domain scores measured during a reference time period;d) determining a current activity level using current domain scores measured during a monitoring time period; and,e) generating an activity indicator at least partially in accordance with the current activity level and the reference activity level, the activity indicator being at least partially indicative of differences between the current activity level and the reference activity level, thereby providing feedback on the activity capabilities of the subject.

In one broad form the present invention seeks to provide apparatus for monitoring activity capabilities of a subject, the apparatus including:a) a plurality of sensors, the sensors being positioned within a living environment of the subject; and,b) at least one processing device that:i) determines sensor data indicative of sensor readings for each of a plurality of sensors, the sensors being positioned within a living environment of the individual and the sensor data for each sensor being at least partially indicative of one or more activities performed by the individual;ii) for each of a plurality of activity domains, determines a domain score indicative of a level of activity within the respective activity domain, the domain score being determined using sensor data from a respective combination of sensors associated with the respective domain;iii) determines a reference activity level using reference domain scores measured during a reference time period;iv) determines a current activity level using current domain scores measured during a monitoring time period; and,v) generates an activity indicator at least partially in accordance with the current activity level and the reference activity level, the activity indicator being at least partially indicative of differences between the current activity level and the reference activity level, thereby providing feedback on the activity capabilities of the subject.

Typically the method includes:a) determining an activity level score by combining the domain scores;b) determining the reference activity level using the activity level score measured during the reference time period; and,c) determining the current activity level using the activity level score measured during the monitoring time period.

Typically the combination includes at least one of:a) a sum; and,b) a weighted sum.

Typically the method includes:a) determining an activity pattern indicative of relative values of domain scores;b) determining the reference activity level using the activity pattern measured during the reference time period; and,c) determining a current activity level using a current activity pattern measured during the monitoring time period.

Typically the method includes:a) comparing the current activity level to the reference activity level; and,b) generating the activity indicator at least partially in accordance with results of the comparison.

Typically the method includes comparing at least one of:a) each current domain score to an equivalent reference domain score;b) each current domain score to a respective reference range derived from an equivalent reference domain score;c) a current activity level score to a reference activity level score;d) a current activity level score to a respective reference range derived from a reference activity level score;e) a current activity pattern to a reference activity pattern; and,f) a current activity level to a reference activity level measured during a corresponding time period.

Typically the method includes:a) determining a condition suffered by the subject; and,b) determining, at least partially in accordance with the condition, at least one of:i) an activity level score;ii) a domain score;iii) a reference domain score range; and,iv) a reference activity level range.

Typically the method includes:a) determining an action rule; and,b) selectively performing an action in accordance with the action rule and in response to the results of the comparison.

Typically the action includes:a) generating an alert notification; and,b) providing the alert notification to a user by transferring the alert notification to a client device of the user via a communications network.

Typically the method includes generating a representation indicative of at least one of:a) results of a comparison;b) current domain scores;c) reference domain scores;d) current activity level scores;e) reference activity level scores;f) current activity level patterns;g) reference activity level patterns; and,h) the activity indicator.

Typically the method includes providing the representation to a client device via a communications network.

Typically the method includes determining a domain score using sensor data from a respective combination of sensors.

Typically the respective combination of sensors for each domain is determined based on at least one:a) a sensor type; and,b) a sensor location.

Typically the sensors include at least one of:a) motion sensors;b) power sensors that monitor operation of appliances;c) temperature sensors;d) humidity sensors;e) accelerometers; and,f) door sensors.

Typically the activity domain includes:a) hygiene;b) nutrition;c) mobility;d) transfer; and,e) dressing/grooming.

Typically the method includes, for at least one domain:a) identifying events using sensor data from the sensors; and,b) determining the domain score using at least one of:i) a sum of a number of events during a time period; and,ii) a sum of a number of clusters of events during a time period.

Typically the method includes identifying events by comparing sensor data to a number of signatures, each signature being indicative of a respective event.

Typically the apparatus includes a hub provided in the living environment, the hub being adapted to communicate with each of the sensors and provided the sensor data to the at least one processing device, via a communications network.

Typically the apparatus includes a processing system including at least one processing device, the processing system communicating with one or more client devices via communications network, to at least one of:a) provide alert notifications to the client devices; and,b) allow the client devices to display a representation indicative of at least one of:i) results of a comparison;ii) current domain scores;iii) reference domain scores;iv) current activity level scores;v) reference activity level scores;vi) current activity level patterns;vii) reference activity level patterns; and,viii) the activity indicator.

It will be appreciated that the broad forms of the invention and their respective features can be used in conjunction and/or independently, and reference to separate broad forms of the invention is not intended to be limiting.

