Research on sensor-based activity recognition has, recently, made significant progress and is attracting growing attention in a number of disciplines and application domains. However, there is a lack of high-level overview on this topic that can inform related communities of the research state of the art. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey to examine the development and current status of various aspects of sensor-based activity recognition. We first discuss the general rationale and distinctions of vision-based and sensor-based activity recognition. Then, we review the major approaches and methods associated with sensor-based activity monitoring, modeling, and recognition from which strengths and weaknesses of those approaches are highlighted. We make a primary distinction in this paper between data-driven and knowledge-driven approaches, and use this distinction to structure our survey. We also discuss some promising directions for future research.

Sensor-Based Activity Recognition

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is a new paradigm in information technology aimed at empowering people's capabilities by means of digital environments that are sensitive, adaptive, and responsive to human needs, habits, gestures, and emotions. This futuristic vision of daily environment will enable innovative human-machine interactions characterized by pervasive, unobtrusive, and anticipatory communications. Such innovative interaction paradigms make AmI technology a suitable candidate for developing various real life solutions, including in the healthcare domain. This survey will discuss the emergence of AmI techniques in the healthcare domain, in order to provide the research community with the necessary background. We will examine the infrastructure and technology required for achieving the vision of AmI, such as smart environments and wearable medical devices. We will summarize the state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies used for developing AmI system in the healthcare domain, including various learning techniques (for learning from user interaction), reasoning techniques (for reasoning about users' goals and intensions), and planning techniques (for planning activities and interactions). We will also discuss how AmI technology might support people affected by various physical or mental disabilities or chronic disease. Finally, we will point to some of the successful case studies in the area and we will look at the current and future challenges to draw upon the possible future research paths.

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A Survey on Ambient Intelligence in Healthcare

https://eecs.wsu.edu/~cook/pubs/pmc12b.pdf

Activity recognition on streaming sensor data

Integrating the various embedded devices and systems in our environment enables an Internet of Things (IoT) for a smart city. The IoT will generate tremendous amount of data that can be leveraged for safety, efficiency, and infotainment applications and services for city residents. The management of this voluminous data through its lifecycle is fundamental to the realization of smart cities. Therefore, in contrast to existing surveys on smart cities we provide a data-centric perspective, describing the fundamental data management techniques employed to ensure consistency, interoperability, granularity, and reusability of the data generated by the underlying IoT for smart cities. Essentially, the data lifecycle in a smart city is dependent on tightly coupled data management with cross-cutting layers of data security and privacy, and supporting infrastructure. Therefore, we further identify techniques employed for data security and privacy, and discuss the networking and computing technologies that enable smart cities. We highlight the achievements in realizing various aspects of smart cities, present the lessons learned, and identify limitations and research challenges.

Smart Cities: A Survey on Data Management, Security, and Enabling Technologies

In this paper, we have described a solution for supporting independent living of the elderly by means of equipping their home with a simple sensor network to monitor their behaviour. Standard home automation sensors including movement sensors and door entry point sensors are used. By monitoring the sensor data, important information regarding any anomalous behaviour will be identified. Different ways of visualizing large sensor data sets and representing them in a format suitable for clustering the abnormalities are also investigated. In the latter part of this paper, recurrent neural networks are used to predict the future values of the activities for each sensor. The predicted values are used to inform the caregiver in case anomalous behaviour is predicted in the near future. Data collection, classification and prediction are investigated in real home environments with elderly occupants suffering from dementia.

Smart homes for the elderly dementia sufferers: identification and prediction of abnormal behaviour

The pervasive sensing technologies found in smart homes offer unprecedented opportunities for providing health monitoring and assistance to individuals experiencing difficulties living independently at home. A primary challenge that needs to be tackled to meet this need is the ability to recognize and track functional activities that people perform in their own homes and everyday settings. In this paper, we look at approaches to perform real-time recognition of Activities of Daily Living. We enhance other related research efforts to develop approaches that are effective when activities are interrupted and interleaved. To evaluate the accuracy of our recognition algorithms we assess them using real data collected from participants performing activities in our on-campus smart apartment testbed.

/pdf/recognizing-independent-and-joint-activities-among-multiple-3jibldcl8a.pdf

Recognizing independent and joint activities among multiple residents in smart environments

The pervasive sensing technologies found in smart homes offer unprecedented opportunities for providing health monitoring and assistance to individuals experiencing difficulties living independently at home. A primary challenge that needs to be tackled to meet this need is the ability to recognize and track functional activities that people perform in their own homes and everyday settings. In this paper we look at approaches to perform real-time recognition of Activities of Daily Living. We enhance other related research efforts to develop approaches that are effective when activities are interrupted and interleaved. To evaluate the accuracy of our recognition algorithms we assess them using real data collected from participants performing activities in our on-campus smart apartment testbed.

/pdf/tracking-activities-in-complex-settings-using-smart-138kw4xo8e.pdf

Tracking Activities in Complex Settings Using Smart Environment Technologies.

The pervasive sensing technologies found in smart environments offer unprecedented opportunities for monitoring and assisting the individuals who live and work in these spaces. An aspect of daily life that is important for one's emotional and physical health is social interaction. In this paper we investigate the use of smart environment technologies to detect and analyze interactions in smart spaces. We introduce techniques for collecting and analyzing sensor information in smart environments to help in interpreting resident behavior patterns and determining when multiple residents are interacting. The effectiveness of our techniques is evaluated using two physical smart environment test beds.

/pdf/detection-of-social-interaction-in-smart-spaces-3w31g39hfq.pdf

Detection of social interaction in smart spaces

Smart environments rely on artificial intelligence techniques to make sense of the sensor data and to use the information for recognition and tracking activities. However, many of the techniques that have been developed are designed for simplified situations. In this paper we discuss a more complex situation, namely recognizing activities when they are interweaved in complex and realistic scenarios. This technology is beneficial for monitoring the health of smart environment residents and for correlating activities with parameters such as energy usage. We describe our approach to interleaved activity recognition and evaluate various probabilistic techniques for activity recognition. We validate our algorithm on real sensor data collecting in our smart apartment testbed.

Geetika Singla

Papers

Recognizing independent and joint activities among multiple residents in smart environments

Tracking Activities in Complex Settings Using Smart Environment Technologies.

Detection of social interaction in smart spaces

Interleaved Activity Recognition for Smart Home residents.