Welcome Dear Visitor,

This website provides an overview of our research activities. This research is carried out in a cooperation of the KHK, M3-BIORES, and De Wingerd; sponsored by IWT and other partners. As you probably already have made up of our url and title (monitoring of discomfort in demented elderly patients based on automatic image recognition), our main goal is to setup a computer vision system which will be able to detect and recognize pain based on face expressions.

Short introduction

Epidemiological research shows that 5% up to 10% of the population older than 65 years is suffering from dementia. An increased ageing of the population furthermore increases the number of patients with dementia.

One important and underestimated aspect is discomfort (pain) in this group of patients. Several studies prove that about 70% of the people living in nursing homes struggle with pain. Almost half of them have chronically pain. Recognition of pain is therefore an important issue for the care-givers. Discomfort is often communicated by these patients by facial expressions of pain.

Because of the (r)evolution in hardware and software today, there are much more techniques available for automatically monitoring of faces. Also quantifying faces is possible based on simple camera's and the use of the newest image processing techniques.

An automatically and continuously monitoring tool  must allow the caregivers and family of the demented elderly to better estimate the needs of the demented elderly, which will result in patient centered care.

News

[March 18, 2009] Digitaal oog spoort pijn beter op Read our latest article in a leading flemish newspaper here! [February 18, 2009] Painvision Symposium Dear reader, On February 13th, 2009 Painvision organized their first Symposium titled “Pijnopvolging bij dementerende bejaarden vanuit de praktijk”. The symposium was held in Living and Care Centre De Wingerd (Leuven) and was a succes! More than 110 participants enjoyed the presentations and provided usefull feedback during the reception afterwards! More info about the symosium, presentations and also some nice pictures of the speakers and reception afterwards are available on our website by just clicking here. Visit also our Newsletters page!

What does this website offers?

• home
• research: a more detailed explanation of our research is given
• newsletters: this page keeps you up to date of the progress we made
• publications: a list of our publications is presented and an overview of interesting conferences is listed up
• staff: everyone who is committed to this project is introduced
• infrastructure:a short overview of our equipment is shown
• partners: all involved partners are listed up
• contact: how to contact us?
• links: some interesting kinks are provided here

Enjoy our webpages and don't hesitate to contact us whenever you wish.