ABSTRACT
Among all the applications of human motion monitoring, this chapter specifically addresses the issue of patient pressure ulcer prevention, which is one of the patient monitoring applications. In the literature, there are three main types of sensors that have been used for human motion monitoring, including body-fixed sensors, optical cameras, and radiofrequency (RF) sensors. The chapter proposes RF-based systems and methods for monitoring motions of multiple human targets in wide-area indoor environments, with the application of monitoring bed-ridden patients for pressure ulcer prevention in long-term care nursing homes. It introduces a noncoherent system to localize and classify human motion in a wide-area indoor environment using multistatic/distributed RF sensors. In the noncoherent system, multiple transmitters and multiple receivers are distributed in a wide area to estimate the locations and velocities of motions from multiple human targets. The noncoherent system provides a more promising solution due to its low complexity and high flexibility.
