Indoor localization solutions to support independent daily life of impaired people at home

While physically disabled people usually do not need to be followed by educators, the circumstances are reversed when dealing with patients affected by any form of mental illness. In this cases, the main focus should be on personal awareness and social rehabilitation requirements. In this context, the increasing availability of broadband technology at home, along with wireless (sensor) networks and a wide range of consumer health electronics are enabling new pervasive healthcare applications, which would allow people to be constantly and transparently monitored in their usual living places. In this paper we deal with one of the key aspects to enable such services: knowing the position of patients at any time and monitor their activities, in particular their too long permanence in a room. To do so, collaborative and device free localization techniques have been proposed so far. We aim to present a comparison of the achieved accuracy of two of such methods in a real use case scenario, which is an apartment in L'Aquila (Italy) where Down people live independently for a few days each week. Our results demonstrate that there are conditions where one solution performs better than the other and vice versa; this suggests to adopt sensor fusion approaches to exploit the complementarity of these different approaches.