Applied Wearable Computing Vision in Walking Navigation for Elderly People

"Sustained assistance" and "enhancement" is the core content in wearable computing of "humanunity" and "human-centered" concept. Affected by organism’s fatigue, mental status, memory status etc, it is necessary to study the real-time visual aids technologies for the elderly people. Wearable vision is one representative of such technologies.

Wearable vision faces some challenge problems: how to deal with the background clutter and changing; how to acquire an image with sufficient quality for recognition; how to select the best quality image in series video and how to real-time strengthen human vision when human need. So, if we want applied wearable vision in helping the elderly, some advantages and also disadvantages should be known. For advantages, wearable vision system can be always moving with the elderly people, their relatives can look at what the elderly looking (shared visual experience ) and system could recognize what the elderly are ignoring, however disadvantages include low resolution, limited Field-of-View, low image quality in mobile snapshot and little uncomfortable when the elderly equip redundant devices.

Walking is the most common daily activities in older people's behavior，we have developed a wearable vision system of motion object detection for safety alarm in walking environment. The system could give elderly people three levels of visual enhancement: stabilization frames; panorama environment image and motion regions marked, and we also develop handled object recognition software for enhancing the ability of memories of elderly people.

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