PoseAction: Action Recognition for Patients in the Ward using Deep Learning Approaches

Real-time intelligent detection and prediction of subjects' behavior particularly their movements or actions is critical in the ward. This approach offers the advantage of reducing in-hospital care costs and improving the efficiency of healthcare workers, which is especially true for scenarios at night or during peak admission periods. Therefore, in this work, we propose using computer vision (CV) and deep learning (DL) methods for detecting subjects and recognizing their actions. We utilize OpenPose as an accurate subject detector for recognizing the positions of human subjects in the video stream. Additionally, we employ AlphAction's Asynchronous Interaction Aggregation (AIA) network to predict the actions of detected subjects. This integrated model, referred to as PoseAction, is proposed. At the same time, the proposed model is further trained to predict 12 common actions in ward areas, such as staggering, chest pain, and falling down, using medical-related video clips from the NTU RGB+D and NTU RGB+D 120 datasets. The results demonstrate that PoseAction achieves the highest classification mAP of 98.72% (IoU@0.5). Additionally, this study develops an online real-time mode for action recognition, which strongly supports the clinical translation of PoseAction. Furthermore, using OpenPose's function for recognizing face key points, we also implement face blurring, which is a practical solution to address the privacy protection concerns of patients and healthcare workers. Nevertheless, the training data for PoseAction is currently limited, particularly in terms of label diversity. Consequently, the subsequent step involves utilizing a more diverse dataset (including general actions) to train the model's parameters for improved generalization.