Body Weight Estimation for Dose-Finding and Health Monitoring of Lying, Standing and Walking Patients Based on RGB-D Data

Sensors (Basel). 2018 Apr 24;18(5):1311. doi: 10.3390/s18051311.

Abstract

This paper describes the estimation of the body weight of a person in front of an RGB-D camera. A survey of different methods for body weight estimation based on depth sensors is given. First, an estimation of people standing in front of a camera is presented. Second, an approach based on a stream of depth images is used to obtain the body weight of a person walking towards a sensor. The algorithm first extracts features from a point cloud and forwards them to an artificial neural network (ANN) to obtain an estimation of body weight. Besides the algorithm for the estimation, this paper further presents an open-access dataset based on measurements from a trauma room in a hospital as well as data from visitors of a public event. In total, the dataset contains 439 measurements. The article illustrates the efficiency of the approach with experiments with persons lying down in a hospital, standing persons, and walking persons. Applicable scenarios for the presented algorithm are body weight-related dosing of emergency patients.

Keywords: RGB-D; human body weight; image processing; kinect; machine learning; perception; segmentation; sensor fusion; stroke; thermal camera.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Body Weight*
  • Humans
  • Posture
  • Walking