A face recognition based system to assist seniors in managing access to their home

This paper describes the design of a system for supporting seniors, which may have limited physical and/or cognitive capabilities or sudden illnesses, in managing the access to their home, automating the process of opening the door in the case of trusted visitors, forbidding the entrance to untrusted visitors and notifying parents or social assistants about abnormal situations, such as repeated attempts of entering by strangers. The prototype is characterized by the simple interface, the low-cost hardware and the modularity of the approach, for simplifying the possible expansion of the system with additional functionalities. The proposal is also part of an educational project which involved students with different backgrounds. The project started with an initial conceptual design, based also on an initial survey with a group of seniors, which was iteratively refined and followed by a prototypical implementation, based on the face recognition services of the Microsoft Viso platform.