The Elderly’s Independent Living in Smart Homes: A Characterization of Activities and Sensing Infrastructure Survey to Facilitate Services Development

Abstract

Human activity detection within smart homes is one of the basis of unobtrusive wellness monitoring of a rapidly aging population in developed countries. Most works in this area use the concept of “activity” as the building block with which to construct applications such as healthcare monitoring or ambient assisted living. The process of identifying a specific activity encompasses the selection of the appropriate set of sensors, the correct preprocessing of their provided raw data and the learning/reasoning using this information. If the selection of the sensors and the data processing methods are wrongly performed, the whole activity detection process may fail, leading to the consequent failure of the whole application. Related to this, the main contributions of this review are the following: first, we propose a classification of the main activities considered in smart home scenarios which are targeted to older people’s independent living, as well as their characterization and formalized context representation; second, we perform a classification of sensors and data processing methods that are suitable for the detection of the aforementioned activities. Our aim is to help researchers and developers in these lower-level technical aspects that are nevertheless fundamental for the success of the complete application.

Healthcare in the Smart Home: A Study of Past, Present and Future

“…A list of common ADLs is shown in Table 2: According to research by Ni et al [44], there are two major types of ADL: essential basic or personal self-care activities (BADL) such as bathing, grooming, toileting and consuming food and drink, and non-essential instrumented or domestic activities (IADL) such as shopping, watching TV and reading. Additionally, although not formally defined, a third ADL can be extrapolated from the text and defined as ambulatory or movement related activities (AADL) such as walking, running and bike riding.…”

Impact of Wireless Communications Technologies on Elder People Healthcare: Smart Home in Australia

“…Most of the concerns raised can be overcome through the development of a new framework based on smart home technologies that may allow older people to remain at home. This study aims to demonstrate that through the integration of wireless communications technology it is possible to replicate nursing home conditions in a smart home and thereby create a modern and more sophisticated solution for older people [9]. The main focus of this study is to describe the process of integration and implementation of this advanced technology [10].…”

Modeling interaction in multi-resident activities

“…Several recent papers highlight the challenges encountered in this field as shown in (Amiribesheli et al, 2015) and (Ni et al, 2015). In a recent work, Amiribesheli et al (2015) discuss the challenges related to data processing (i.e., maintaining the security, privacy and reliability of an activity data)and to activity recognition modelling (i.e., recognizing interweaved and concurrent activities, imbalanced data, online activity learning, applicability and adaptability of the activity model, scalability of the activity model).…”

“…In a recent work, Amiribesheli et al (2015) discuss the challenges related to data processing (i.e., maintaining the security, privacy and reliability of an activity data)and to activity recognition modelling (i.e., recognizing interweaved and concurrent activities, imbalanced data, online activity learning, applicability and adaptability of the activity model, scalability of the activity model). Ni et al (Ni et al, 2015) discuss eight challenges to solve before improving the quality of life in a smart home for an elderly. Clearly, HAR in a multi-resident environment only represents one of the challenges to face among many others relevant to HAR in a single resident environment.…”