Ultra-sensitive Human-detecting Sensor Technology for

Elderly Care
Detect Minute Movements at the Level of Human Breathing

Corporate Research & Development Center

Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd.
1. Introduction
In Japan's rapidly aging society in recent years, issues of
participation in society and of medical and nursing care for the
elderly are manifesting. Companies are undertaking a variety of
initiatives to realize a safe and secure society, attempting to capture
potential growing markets. Of these, we are focusing on issues for
capable elderly people that live alone, and using ICT based sensor
technology to study services that watch over them unobtrusively.
If a human-detecting sensor is placed in the rooms where a
person lives, the sensor responds to the activities of the person, and
the rhythm of their life can be seen by observing the frequencies
of those responses. Pyroelectric infrared sensors have been widely
used in this type of service, to detect whether the person is present
or not from changes in temperatures. However, while these
sensors are well suited to detecting moving people, there are issues
with detecting people at rest. Thus, we have focused our research
on microwave radio sensors, which can penetrate or go around
obstacles and detect not only people's large movements, but also
minute movements such as breathing or heartbeats, using the
Doppler Effect, yielding methods that can detect people at rest
with high sensitivity.

2. Human-detecting sensor technology

In the past, microwave radio sensors have been used in some
human sensors. However, using a single sensor to cover a whole
room in a typical house, results in problems such as responding to
movements of other than the desired person, such as an indoor fan,
vehicles or people passing by outside. This made it very difficult to
use for detection of any but the largest and local movements such
as automatic doors or gates.
We have conducted R&D on statistical models to extract
the movements of people with high precision by examining the
differences in how objects shake while moving and by eliminating
the effects of moving background objects from the output of
the radio sensor. We gathered large amounts of experimental
data assuming environmental factors likely to occur in ordinary
households, and by improving on this model, we have implemented
high-precision sensing of people at rest, at the level of breathing,
and that is not affected by environmental factors (Figure 1).
The radio sensors used in this technology do not require the
sensors to be exposed, so they are not conspicuous. This helps
reduce resistance to installation in private spaces. The signals also
penetrate furniture and bedding, and are resilient to elements in

Figure 1: Example of output from radio human sensor compared to conventional technology

New Breeze Spring 2013

 Figure 2: Visualization of daily life activity

Figure 3: Example application in elderly care

heaters and changes in room-temperature, so they can be used in

most bathrooms, which are warm and humid environments. These
sensors show promise for applications monitoring and watching
over people at home or in the hospital.

3. Application for watching over the elderly

This sensor technology, is able to distinguish between active
and rest states in real time, so it can be applied for checking
the state of well-being of the elderly who live alone, away from
the their children's families. By installing them in the homes
or care-facility private rooms of elderly persons, it is possible to
build a monitoring system able to collect a very precise history of
their daily life, including times of rest and sleeping, as shown in
the example in Figure 2. The system can then be built to detect
abnormalities by incorporating rule-based logic, as shown in
Figure 3. In the future, we plan to summarize detection results
on the cloud, and to implement sophisticated visualizations of
daily life rhythms and state of health by analyzing large amounts

of daily-activity history. As examples, in addition to transition

patterns for states such as at home (in the room) and out, which
can be estimated using rules, it should be possible to implement
sophisticated detection of abnormalities in factors such as
time at home (for wandering), bathing or using the toilet (for
impaired consciousness), or abnormal sleep indicators (breathing
impairment) by building a probability model that combines such
state transition patterns and time information.

4. Future initiatives
In the future, we will advance our R&D activity beyond
visualization of life states to include more-active detection of
abnormalities, contributing to a more safe and secure aging
society. At the same time, we will also examine application of this
technology for other fields such as security and energy savings.
We hope to implement services offering value that society will
accept, by demonstrating applications for initiatives such as Smart
Community and Smart House.

New Breeze Spring 2013