A hierarchal framework for recognising activities of daily life

PhDIn today’s working world the elderly who are dependent can sometimes be neglected by society. Statistically, after toddlers it is the elderly who are observed to have higher accident rates while performing everyday activities. Alzheimer’s disease is one of the major impairments that elderly people suffer from, and leads to the elderly person not being able to live an independent life due to forgetfulness. One way to support elderly people who aspire to live an independent life and remain safe in their home is to find out what activities the elderly person is carrying out at a given time and provide appropriate assistance or institute safeguards. The aim of this research is to create improved methods to identify tasks related to activities of daily life and determine a person’s current intentions and so reason about that person’s future intentions. A novel hierarchal framework has been developed, which recognises sensor events and maps them to significant activities and intentions. As privacy is becoming a growing concern, the monitoring of an individual’s behaviour can be seen as intrusive. Hence, the monitoring is based around using simple non intrusive sensors and tags on everyday objects that are used to perform daily activities around the home. Specifically there is no use of any cameras or visual surveillance equipment, though the techniques developed are still relevant in such a situation. Models for task recognition and plan recognition have been developed and tested on scenarios where the plans can be interwoven. Potential targets are people in the first stages of Alzheimer’s disease and in the structuring of the library of kernel plan sequences, typical routines used to sustain meaningful activity have been used. Evaluations have been carried out using volunteers conducting activities of daily life in an experimental home environment. The results generated from the sensors have been interpreted and analysis of developed algorithms has been made. The outcomes and findings of these experiments demonstrate that the developed hierarchal framework is capable of carrying activity recognition as well as being able to carry out intention analysis, e.g. predicting what activity they are most likely to carry out next

Recognising Activities of Daily Life through the Usage of Everyday Objects around the Home

The integration of RFID sensors into everyday products has become a widespread solution for increasing efficiency in supply chain management. This has also led to a way of being able to monitor everyday activities in the home based on when and how these products are used, which is less intrusive than other monitoring approaches such as visual based systems. Monitoring activities in a home environment can be seen as a good way of analyzing behavior and tracking functional decline among elderly people. This paper describes a hierarchal approach for activity recognition using object usage data generated by everyday products used around the home. The motivation of this work is to allow people with early Alzheimer’s disease to have additional years of independent living before the disease reaches a stage where the person is fully dependable on someone else

An Analysis of Intelligent Failure within Corporate Entrepreneurship

Intelligent failure occurs when an entrepreneurial initiative falls short of its anticipated performance. It provides valuable new knowledge to the organisation and is recognised as an important factor in long-term corporate entrepreneurial success. This thesis is located within the domain of corporate entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial failure, and explores the various processes of intelligent failure. The specific aim of this thesis is to learn how organisations manage intelligent failure. Research takes an inductive approach with the predominant use of a qualitative methodology and, as part of a multiple case study strategy, research is carried out in six organisations operating in differing sectors within the UK. Findings indicate that the organisations often fail to manage intelligent failure. There is little evidence of a strategic approach to learning from failure and, where learning occurs, it is predominantly unstructured. This is significant because literature consistently argues that a structured process is required to manage learning from failure successfully. This research recognises that structured processes may be more effective than unstructured processes when looked at in isolation. However, this thesis argues that unstructured mechanisms do have inherent value. Therefore, when organisations develop failure management processes, a dual path may be considered, which might extract value from both systems as is contextually appropriate. This may enable organisations to maximise their ability to learn from failure. This thesis adds to existing management theory in the corporate entrepreneurship domain. In specifically focusing on the structured and unstructured forms within the process of intelligent failure, this thesis addresses a gap in current literature. It also adds to existing literature that centres on the practical management of the learning from failure process

Device-Free, Activity during Daily Life, Recognition Using a Low-Cost Lidar

Device-free or off-body sensing methods, such as Lidar, can be used for location-driven Activities during Daily Life (ADL) recognition without the need for a mobile host such as a human or robot to use on-body location sensors. Because if such an attachment fails, or is not operational (powered up), when such mobile hosts are device free, it still works. Hence, this paper proposes an innovative method for recognizing ADLs using a state-of-art seq2seq Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model to classify centimeter level accurate location data from a low-cost, 360°rotating 2D Lidar device. We researched, developed, deployed and validated the system. The results indicate that it can provide a centimeter-level localization accuracy of 88% when recognizing 17 targeted location-related daily activities

Developing physical activity interventions for children with a visual impairment:lessons from the First Steps initiative

Children with a visual impairment are less active than their sighted peers. Yet they are born with the potential to match their sighted peers’ motor skill competency and levels of physical fitness. Environmental barriers are one of the main causes of inequities. This paper provides insight on these issues, drawing upon a physical activity intervention called ‘First Steps’, a British Blind Sport initiative that aimed to get more children with a visual impairment more active.Physical activity packs were delivered to 53 children aged 5-15 years old with a visual impairment. Of these participants, 62% had additional impairments or medical conditions. A mixed-methods approach was used to gather participants’ experiences of physical activity prior to receiving this pack and canvas opinion on how the pack changed their activity levels. The findings revealed inequitable experiences of physical activity. The First Steps pack made considerable progress in developing children’s physical activity levels. Participants’ motor skills, social interactions and confidence improved. Organisations working with this population might look to adopt a similar concept. Recommendations for those wishing to do so are provided.<br/

Embracing Complexity: Creating Cultural Change Through Education for Sustainability

Campus Kindergarten in Brisbane, Australia, is a community-based organisation for children and families that has embraced change through the evolution of its internationally acclaimed ‘Sustainable Planet Project’. The centre initiated the project in 1997, introducing a range of new curriculum and pedagogical processes - always with young children at the heart - that have led to improvements in play spaces, reduced waste, lowered water consumption and improved biodiversity. This child-focussed approach is reflected in the way that children’s ideas provide much of the motivation and inspiration for changing to more sustainable practices. A whole centre project on water conservation, for example, was sparked when preschoolers (aged 4 years) articulated their concerns to staff about water use in the sandpit. This paper overviews a recent research project designed to document, examine and highlight the Sustainable Planet Project, to assist centre staff, researchers and others with a commitment to sustainability, to understanding the change processes. An important feature has been the project's slow, sometimes erratic, development that has always added complexity to the teachers’ work. Such change, however, has not been viewed negatively. Complexity theory has helped to explain the project’s evolution and complexity has been embraced as a vehicle for creativity, engagement, critique and ongoing change in this learning organisation. As a consequence, a culture of sustainability now permeates the centre where a strong vision has been translated into small but realistic goals and achievements