Research and Development

Washroom monitoring systems

There are a number of medical emergency situations which happen in washrooms which are an enclosed area where others may not notice and it may become too late to respond. Therefore, early discovery of abnormality is necessary to save lives. We are developing systems which detect abnormalities in washrooms and send out a warning in real time.
The system uses an Infra-Red (IR) laser and a laser beam splitter (FG element) to illuminate the entire washroom with 1500 to 2000 IR beams and a camera with a solid state sensor such as CCD collects the positions of the beams. The system only collects the information of the light spots, not the image of the person. The system compares the positions of the light spots with and without a person to reconstruct the scene 3 dimensionally. Thus, the privacy of the person is protected and only posture information is continuously collected. We will make the neural network study of the safe and dangerous posture information so that it can discern the dangerous situations and report to family members or caretakers.
We also intend to develop a flexible system which can accommodate different sizes and shapes of the washrooms, body shapes of a person and activities such as reading a newspaper. The images below depict how our system capture different postures.