Telemonitoring with Radar Sensor: an Ethical Tool for the Well-Being of the Elderly

Monitoring and caring for the elderly is becoming an increasingly urgent priority due to the rapid aging of the global population especially in low- and middle-income countries. In such countries there may be a shortage of specialists and an inadequate level of health facilities, together with long distances between hospital centers and economic barriers that limit access to medical care. Information and communication technologies (ICT) offer promising solutions to address these problems through telemedicine, telehealth and teleassistance applications, while fully respecting the ethical and privacy requirements of individuals. This study demonstrates the possibility of using radar sensors combined with deep learning techniques for non-contact and non-invasive monitoring of people, as an example for the detection of behavioral parameters indicative of the presence or onset of pathologies. As a use case, this paper describes the method by which the gait speed parameter can be extracted using a radar sensor by applying deep learning-based processing of the map.