Development of a bathroom watching system based on breath detection and silhouette extraction

Sudden death in bathrooms is an important social problem in Japan. This paper proposes a bathroom watching system with the aim of detecting bathing people who are drowning. This system employs a fiber grating vision system and a color camera to detect breathing and the position of a bather, as well as to perform a self-diagnosis of the system operational state. The effectiveness of these functions was verified through experiments.