ECE Seminar: Caring Analytics for Long-Term Care of People with Special Needs

This talk describes our efforts to build cyber-physical systems to help care for people with special needs. The term "special needs" covers a wide range of cognitive and physical limitations. With a growing worldwide population of people with special needs, we need to find new ways to give these people meaningful lives. Because the special needs population covers such a wide range of conditions, the traditional, diagnosis-driven medical approach will not scale. My student Honggab Kim and I have developed tracking algorithms that can generate useful activity summaries from sparse sensor data in complex environments. We have also developed a clustering algorithm to compare activities and identify outliers.