Vision-based patient monitoring: a comprehensive review of algorithms and technologies

Vision-based monitoring for assisted living is gaining increasing attention, especially in multi-modal monitoring systems owing to the several advantages of vision-based sensors. In this paper, a detailed survey of some of the important vision-based patient monitoring applications is presented, namely (a) fall detection (b) action and activity monitoring (c) sleep monitoring (d) respiration and apnea monitoring (e) epilepsy monitoring (f) vital signs monitoring and (g) facial expression monitoring. The challenges and state-of-art technologies in each of these applications is presented. This is the first work to present such a comprehensive survey with the focus on a set of seven most common applications pertaining to patient monitoring. Potential future directions are presented while also considering practical large scale deployment of vision-based systems in patient monitoring. One of the important conclusions drawn is that rather than applying generic algorithms, use of the application context of patient monitoring can be a useful way to develop novel techniques that are robust and yet cost-effective.