3D Sensing Algorithms Towards Building an Intelligent Intensive Care Unit

Intensive Care Units (ICUs) are chaotic places where hundreds of tasks are carried out by many different people. Timely and coordinated execution of these tasks are directly related to quality of patient outcomes. An improved understanding of the current care process can aid in improving quality. Our goal is to build towards a system that automatically catalogs various tasks being performed by the bedside. We propose a set of techniques using computer vision and machine learning to develop a system that passively senses the environment and identifies seven common actions such as documenting, checking up on a patient, and performing a procedure. Preliminary evaluation of our system on 5.5 hours of data from the Pediatric ICU obtains overall task recognition accuracy of 70%. Furthermore, we show how it can be used to summarize and visualize tasks. Our system provides a significant departure from current approaches used for quality improvement. With further improvement, we think that such a system could realistically be deployed in the ICU.