A Hybrid Ontological and Temporal Approach for Composite Activity Modelling

Activity modelling is required to support activity recognition and further to provide activity assistance for users in smart homes. Current research in knowledge-driven activity modelling has mainly focused on single activities with little attention being paid to the modelling of composite activities such as interleaved and concurrent activities. This paper presents a hybrid approach to composite activity modelling by combining ontological and temporal knowledge modelling formalisms. Ontological modelling constructors, i.e. concepts and properties for describing composite activities, have been developed and temporal modelling operators have been introduced. As such, the resulting approach is able to model both static and dynamic characteristics of activities. Several composite activity models have been created based on the proposed approach. In addition, a set of inference rules has been provided for use in composite activity recognition. A concurrent meal preparation scenario is used to illustrate both the proposed approach and associated reasoning mechanisms for composite activity recognition

Robotic ubiquitous cognitive ecology for smart homes

Robotic ecologies are networks of heterogeneous robotic devices pervasively embedded in everyday environments, where they cooperate to perform complex tasks. While their potential makes them increasingly popular, one fundamental problem is how to make them both autonomous and adaptive, so as to reduce the amount of preparation, pre-programming and human supervision that they require in real world applications. The project RUBICON develops learning solutions which yield cheaper, adaptive and efficient coordination of robotic ecologies. The approach we pursue builds upon a unique combination of methods from cognitive robotics, machine learning, planning and agent- based control, and wireless sensor networks. This paper illustrates the innovations advanced by RUBICON in each of these fronts before describing how the resulting techniques have been integrated and applied to a smart home scenario. The resulting system is able to provide useful services and pro-actively assist the users in their activities. RUBICON learns through an incremental and progressive approach driven by the feed- back received from its own activities and from the user, while also self-organizing the manner in which it uses available sensors, actuators and other functional components in the process. This paper summarises some of the lessons learned by adopting such an approach and outlines promising directions for future work

Activity Recognition using Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models on Streaming Sensor Data

Activity recognition from sensor data deals with various challenges, such as overlapping activities, activity labeling, and activity detection. Although each challenge in the field of recognition has great importance, the most important one refers to online activity recognition. The present study tries to use online hierarchical hidden Markov model to detect an activity on the stream of sensor data which can predict the activity in the environment with any sensor event. The activity recognition samples were labeled by the statistical features such as the duration of activity. The results of our proposed method test on two different datasets of smart homes in the real world showed that one dataset has improved 4% and reached (59%) while the results reached 64.6% for the other data by using the best methods

Interoperable services based on activity monitoring in ambient assisted living environments

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is considered as the main technological solution that will enable the aged and people in recovery to maintain their independence and a consequent high quality of life for a longer period of time than would otherwise be the case. This goal is achieved by monitoring human’s activities and deploying the appropriate collection of services to set environmental features and satisfy user preferences in a given context. However, both human monitoring and services deployment are particularly hard to accomplish due to the uncertainty and ambiguity characterising human actions, and heterogeneity of hardware devices composed in an AAL system. This research addresses both the aforementioned challenges by introducing 1) an innovative system, based on Self Organising Feature Map (SOFM), for automatically classifying the resting location of a moving object in an indoor environment and 2) a strategy able to generate context-aware based Fuzzy Markup Language (FML) services in order to maximize the users’ comfort and hardware interoperability level. The overall system runs on a distributed embedded platform with a specialised ceiling- mounted video sensor for intelligent activity monitoring. The system has the ability to learn resting locations, to measure overall activity levels, to detect specific events such as potential falls and to deploy the right sequence of fuzzy services modelled through FML for supporting people in that particular context. Experimental results show less than 20% classification error in monitoring human activities and providing the right set of services, showing the robustness of our approach over others in literature with minimal power consumption