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Monitoring Hand-Washing Practices using Structural Vibrations
Abstract
In this paper, we present a novel system for monitoring hand-washing activities using vibration sensing of the sink structure. In the United States alone, more than 1.7 million patients each year are subjected to preventable infections in the hospital. Proper handwashing practices are essential for reducing these hospital-acquired infections. Existing approaches for monitoring hand-washing practices include visual observation, wearable sensing, and cameras. These approaches have been limited due to logistical challenges, deployment cost, and intrusiveness. Our system detects and monitors hand-washing activities by measuring the vibration response of the sink structure due to the hand-washing activities. We utilize the key insight that each activity associated with hand-washing (e.g. water running, soap dispenser actuating, hands rinsing with water, etc.) generates unique structural vibration responses in the sink structure. Our approach has the advantage of passively monitoring hand-washing activities through minimal cost-effective sensors with no requirements for additional staff or intrusive wearable sensors. The main research question is how to identify governing features that can distinguish the structural vibration responses due to each hand-washing activity. Our approach investigates the energy distribution of the vibration signal response from each hand-washing activity in the frequency domain. This approach uses the insight that each hand-washing activity generates different responses in the natural frequencies of the sink structure. Our method achieves an average classification accuracy of 95.4% with real-world experiments.
DOI
10.12783/shm2017/14133
10.12783/shm2017/14133
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