Towards unobtrusive mental well-being monitoring for independent-living elderly

• Main Authors: HUYNH, Sinh, TAN, Hwee-Pink, LEE, Youngki
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
• Subjects: Depression; Elderly; Loneliness; Monitoring system; Databases and Information Systems; Experimental Analysis of Behavior; Mental and Social Health; Social Welfare; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3673; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4675/viewcontent/p1_huynh.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

It is essential to proactively detect mental health problems such as loneliness and depression in the independently-living elderly for timely intervention by caregivers. In this paper, we introduce an unobtrusive sensor-enabled monitoring system that has been deployed to 50 government housing ats with the independent-living elderly for two years. Then, we also present our initial findings from the 6-month sensor data between August 2015 and April 2016 as well as the survey data to measure the subjective well-being indicator. Our study showed the promising results that "room-level movements within a house" and "going out" behavior captured by our simple sensor system has a potential to detect the cases of severe loneliness and depression with the precision of 10/16 and recall of 10/12.