An Edge Computing and Ambient Data Capture System for Clinical and Home Environments

The non-contact patient monitoring paradigm moves patient care into their homes and enables long-term patient studies. The challenge, however, is to make the system non-intrusive, privacy-preserving, and low-cost. To this end, we describe an open-source edge computing and ambient data capture system, developed using low-cost and readily available hardware. We describe five applications of our ambient data capture system. Namely: (1) Estimating occupancy and human activity phenotyping; (2) Medical equipment alarm classification; (3) Geolocation of humans in a built environment; (4) Ambient light logging; and (5) Ambient temperature and humidity logging. We obtained an accuracy of [Formula: see text] for estimating occupancy from video. We stress-tested the alarm note classification in the absence and presence of speech and obtained micro averaged [Formula: see text] scores of [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] , respectively. The geolocation tracking provided a room-level accuracy of [Formula: see text]. The root mean square error in the temperature sensor validation task was [Formula: see text] C and for the humidity sensor, it was [Formula: see text] Relative Humidity. The low-cost edge computing system presented here demonstrated the ability to capture and analyze a wide range of activities in a privacy-preserving manner in clinical and home environments and is able to provide key insights into the healthcare practices and patient behaviors.