An Indoor-Monitoring LiDAR Sensor for Patients with Alzheimer Disease Residing in Long-Term Care Facilities

This paper introduces an indoor-monitoring LiDAR sensor for patients with Alzheimer disease residing in long-term care facilities (LTCFs), and this sensor exploits an optoelectronic analog front-end (AFE) to detect light signals from targets by utilizing on-chip avalanche photodiodes (APDs) realized in a 180 nm CMOS process and a neural processing unit (NPU) used for motion detection and decisions, especially for incidents of falls occurring in LTCFs. The AFE consists of an on-chip CMOS P⁺/N-well APD, a linear-mode transimpedance amplifier, a post-amplifier, and a time-to-digital converter, whereas the NPU exploits network sparsity and approximate processing elements for low-power operation. This work provides a potential solution of low-cost, low-power, indoor-monitoring LiDAR sensors for patients with Alzheimer disease in LTCFs.