SinkAmp: Interactive Sink to Detect Living Habits for Healthcare and Quality of Life

We have developed SinkAmp which detects living habits (e.g., hand wash, face wash, gargle) from the sound of water flow and talks interactively to users through synthetic sounds. Healthcare has been getting important recently, especially for the elderly. In such situations, a monitoring service is one of the solutions to watch a target person continuously through a camera and report whether the person is healthy or not through e-mail. However, camera-based monitoring makes people's activities limited, because the camera becomes a mental barrier to people. In contrast, our SinkAmp is set inside the sink where people wash their hands and often drink water, so invisible and ambient monitoring is possible. This paper describes our SinkAmp focusing on its implementation and initial evaluation.