Monitoring health status of elderly people living alone at home using Markov model

This paper presents the sequence generation of occupancy pattern and analysis techniques using Markov model to observe the dynamic behaviour of elderly people living alone in their homes. In this paper, we model the movement pattern of elderly people living alone at home as a discrete time, homogeneous Markov chain where each room of the house is modeled as a state of the Markov chain. We describe the model and present a procedure for determining model structure. The work presented here establishes analytically the probability distribution of occupancy in each state. These parameters help us to understand the long term dynamics of the system to forecast changes in the health status of the elderly people.