A Systematic Approach to Adaptive Activity Modeling and Discovery in Smart Homes

Activity modelling and discovery plays a critical role in smart home based assisted living. Existing approaches to pattern recognition using data-intensive analysis suffers from various drawbacks. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces a novel ontology-based approach to activity modelling, activity discovery and evolution. In this approach, activity modelling is undertaken through ontological engineering by leveraging domain knowledge and heuristics. The generated activity models evolve from the initial “seed” activity models through continuous activity discovery and learning. Activity discovery is performed through ontological reasoning. The paper describes the approach in the context of smart home with special emphases placed on activity discovery algorithms and evolution mechanism. The approach has been implemented in a feature-rich assistive living system in which new daily activities can be detected and further used to evolve the underlying activity models.