Background
The world is aging quickly. Most senior or elderly people prefer to aging at homes. Many of them live alone, but they face many challenges to their health and safety. On the other hand, in the value-based healthcare system, there are growing demands to monitor the activities of patients at homes, and even identify some diseases earlier to reduce the cost to the healthcare system. How to monitor the health and safety of seniors and patients while respecting their privacy is a great challenge.
Since 2018, AltumView has developed the Sentinare smart activity sensor for senior care and remote patient monitoring. It uses the latest AI technology to monitor the activity of people, collect health statistics, and notify caregivers when emergencies such as falls are detected. To protect privacy, only stick figure animations are transmitted instead of videos.
AltumView has become a global leader in privacy-preserving AI for healthcare. Its product received CES 2021 Innovation Award Honoree, and is one of only three fall detection devices integrated into Amazon’s Alexa Together emergency service.
The aims/ objectives of the project
Currently AltumView’s algorithms are operating in the sensor. Due to the limited computational resources in the sensor, these algorithms can only detect basic actions such as standing, sitting, and falling.
In this project, we aim to develop cloud-based algorithms to recognize more complicated activities, including activities of daily living (ADLs), such as eating, drinking, and cooking. Being able to recognize these activities will provide valuable information to the family and doctors to monitor the health and safety of the seniors and patients.
Based on the stick figure data from AltumView’s product, our long-term goal is to develop algorithms to perform cognitive assessment, and identify some behavioral diseases earlier, such as Parkinson’s disease, dementia, anxiety, depression, and autism, by collaborating with more physicians and hospitals.
The skills/ competencies the intern is expected to develop through the internship
The intern should have good knowledge of deep learning. In the project, the intern will learn more on privacy-preserving AI, especially the latest large-model-based AIs. The intern will also learn valuable product development experience, and how to combine research and product development under various constraints.
How the project and internship will support the company
In this project, the intern will learn and develop algorithms using various latest tools in AI, such as Graph Convolution Network (GCN), Graph Transformer (GT), and large-language-models (LLM) and large-vision-language-models (VLM) such as ChatGPT and Sora, which have demonstrated revolutionary performances in many fields. AltumView is also the only company in the world that has accumulated millions of hours of privacy-preserving stick figure data, which is extremely valuable in developing large-model-based AI algorithms.
The intern will focus on two aspects:
- We will focus on developing stick-figure-based methods, since AltumView sensor only transmits stick figures to the server. Although there have been some stick figure-based GCN and GT methods, stick-figure-based VLM methods have not been well studied. This creates a good opportunity to make some breakthrough in this unique and important field, given the enormous practical application potential of AltumView’s product. It will significantly enhance AltumView’s competitiveness in the market.
- We will focus on developing low-cost and high-performance algorithms. Since our algorithms only use stick figure instead of videos, its complexity is already much lower than video-based methods. If we can further reduce the complexity of stick-figure-based methods without sacrificing too much the performance, we will have a great advantage compared to other products.
In summary, this project will develop novel privacy-preserving AI algorithms for healthcare, apply them to AltumView’s product, enhance its leadership in the market, help more seniors and patients around the world, and contribute to Canada’s economy.