11th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare

Research Article

Did you Remember to Brush? : A Noninvasive Wearable Approach to Recognizing Brushing Teeth for Elderly Care

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1145/3154862.3154866,
        author={Josh Cherian and Vijay Rajanna and Daniel Goldberg and Tracy Hammond},
        title={Did you Remember to Brush? : A Noninvasive Wearable Approach to Recognizing Brushing Teeth for Elderly Care},
        proceedings={11th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare},
        publisher={ACM},
        proceedings_a={PERVASIVEHEALTH},
        year={2018},
        month={1},
        keywords={activity recognition brushing teeth pervasive health wearable solution elderly care dementia machine learning intervention},
        doi={10.1145/3154862.3154866}
    }
    
  • Josh Cherian
    Vijay Rajanna
    Daniel Goldberg
    Tracy Hammond
    Year: 2018
    Did you Remember to Brush? : A Noninvasive Wearable Approach to Recognizing Brushing Teeth for Elderly Care
    PERVASIVEHEALTH
    ACM
    DOI: 10.1145/3154862.3154866
Josh Cherian1,*, Vijay Rajanna1, Daniel Goldberg1, Tracy Hammond1
  • 1: Texas A&M University
*Contact email: jcherian14@tamu.edu

Abstract

Failing to brush one’s teeth regularly can have surprisinglyserious health consequences, from periodontal disease tocoronary heart disease to pancreatic cancer. This problemis especially worrying when caring for the elderly and/orindividuals with dementia, as they often forget or are unableto perform standard health activities such as brushing theirteeth, washing their hands, and taking medication. To ensurethat such individuals are correctly looked after they areplaced under the supervision of caretakers or family members,simultaneously limiting their independence and placing animmense burden on their family members and caretakers. Toaddress this problem we developed a non-invasive wearablesystem based on a wrist-mounted accelerometer to accuratelyidentify when a person brushed their teeth. We tested theefficacy of our system with a month-long in-the-wild studyand achieved an accuracy of 94% and an F-measure of 0.82.