Personnel working in health services and food preparation industries maintain hand hygiene by washing their hands. Often this follows the WHO hand hygiene guidelines. Systems exist to monitor and detect compliance with all stages of the guidelines. However, the critical step of verifying whether the subject has correctly lathered soap on the hands can only be monitored using wrist worn sensors. This comes with several disadvantages: the wearable sensors may become contaminated, require battery, the user forgets to wear or misplaces the device. We address these problems by proposing WashInDepth, a system which uses a fixed contactless depth sensor mounted above the wash basin and is activated using a wireless trigger. As the system is fixed in position and contactless, there is reduced chance of contamination, the option to not require a battery and no possibility of forgetting or misplacement of the device. This system provides the potential ability to warn a person, after they have washed their hand, if improper application of soap was detected based on their hand gestures. We evaluate the gesture detection accuracy with 15 subjects and achieve 94% gesture detection accuracy. We deploy the system on a low power Compute Stick and demonstrate that it can keep track of hand gestures in real-time when video is recorded at 20 FPS.
['Henry Zhong', 'Salil S. Kanhere', 'Chun Tung Chou']
WashInDepth: Lightweight Hand Wash Monitor Using Depth Sensor