Distributed Multi-Sensor Systems For Human Safety And Health

DistriMuSe intends to support human health and safety by improved sensing of human presence, behaviour and vital signs in a collaborative or common environment by means of multi-sensor systems, distributed processing and machine learning. Monitoring of people raises ethics concerns which we will address carefully for each use case.

The project works in three domains through specific use cases that will illustrate the potential of our approach to improve human health and safety. These use cases and their high-level objectives are:

1) Continuous hybrid health monitoring – aimed at providing means to continuously and unobtrusively monitor a person’s health state to enable 1) early detection of adverse health developments in elderly people, 2) near-clinical sleep monitoring at home to detect sleep-related health issues, and 3) timely and personalised rehabilitation and coaching services.
2) Situational awareness for VRU and driver safety – focused on ensuring safe traffic and especially protecting the VRU (vulnerable road users) by the continuous monitoring of 1) the behaviour and intentions of VRUs when interacting with traffic, and 2) the drivers’ ability to drive and ensuring their attention is appropriate for the given traffic situation including VRUs.
3) Safe interaction with robots – dedicated to factory floors shared by human workers and robots, enabling more efficient human-robot cooperation by providing the robots with better monitoring capabilities of the presence and an understanding of the intentions of their human counterparts. Our goal is gradually eliminating the safety fences that separate humans and industrial robots in such environments, permitting an efficient and safe collaboration between them.