195 research outputs found
Activities recognition and worker profiling in the intelligent office environment using a fuzzy finite state machine
Analysis of the office workersâ activities of daily working in an intelligent office environment can be used to optimize energy consumption and also office workersâ comfort. To achieve this end, it is essential to recognise office workersâ activities including short breaks, meetings and non-computer activities to allow an optimum control strategy to be implemented. In this paper, fuzzy finite state machines are used to model an office workerâs behaviour. The model will incorporate sensory data collected from the environment as the input and some pre-defined fuzzy states are used to develop the model. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of this approach. The activity models of different individual workers as inferred from the sensory devices can be distinguished. However, further investigation is required to create a more complete model
Ami-deu : un cadre sémantique pour des applications adaptables dans des environnements intelligents
Cette thĂšse vise Ă Ă©tendre lâutilisation de l'Internet des objets (IdO) en facilitant le dĂ©veloppement dâapplications par des personnes non experts en dĂ©veloppement logiciel. La thĂšse propose une nouvelle approche pour augmenter la sĂ©mantique des applications dâIdO et lâimplication des experts du domaine dans le dĂ©veloppement dâapplications sensibles au contexte. Notre approche permet de gĂ©rer le contexte changeant de lâenvironnement et de gĂ©nĂ©rer des applications qui sâexĂ©cutent dans plusieurs environnements intelligents pour fournir des actions requises dans divers contextes. Notre approche est mise en Ćuvre dans un cadriciel (AmI-DEU) qui inclut les composants pour le dĂ©veloppement dâapplications IdO. AmI-DEU intĂšgre les services dâenvironnement, favorise lâinteraction de lâutilisateur et fournit les moyens de reprĂ©senter le domaine dâapplication, le profil de lâutilisateur et les intentions de lâutilisateur. Le cadriciel permet la dĂ©finition dâapplications IoT avec une intention dâactivitĂ© autodĂ©crite qui contient les connaissances requises pour rĂ©aliser lâactivitĂ©. Ensuite, le cadriciel gĂ©nĂšre Intention as a Context (IaaC), qui comprend une intention dâactivitĂ© autodĂ©crite avec des connaissances colligĂ©es Ă Ă©valuer pour une meilleure adaptation dans des environnements intelligents.
La sĂ©mantique de lâAmI-DEU est basĂ©e sur celle du ContextAA (Context-Aware Agents) â une plateforme pour fournir une connaissance du contexte dans plusieurs environnements. Le cadriciel effectue une compilation des connaissances par des rĂšgles et l'appariement sĂ©mantique pour produire des applications IdO autonomes capables de sâexĂ©cuter en ContextAA. AmI- DEU inclut Ă©galement un outil de dĂ©veloppement visuel pour le dĂ©veloppement et le dĂ©ploiement rapide d'applications sur ContextAA. L'interface graphique dâAmI-DEU adopte la mĂ©taphore du flux avec des aides visuelles pour simplifier le dĂ©veloppement d'applications en permettant des dĂ©finitions de rĂšgles Ă©tape par Ă©tape. Dans le cadre de lâexpĂ©rimentation, AmI-DEU comprend un banc dâessai pour le dĂ©veloppement dâapplications IdO. Les rĂ©sultats expĂ©rimentaux montrent une optimisation sĂ©mantique potentielle des ressources pour les applications IoT dynamiques dans les maisons intelligentes et les villes intelligentes.
Notre approche favorise l'adoption de la technologie pour amĂ©liorer le bienĂȘtre et la qualitĂ© de vie des personnes. Cette thĂšse se termine par des orientations de recherche que le cadriciel AmI-DEU dĂ©voile pour rĂ©aliser des environnements intelligents omniprĂ©sents fournissant des adaptations appropriĂ©es pour soutenir les intentions des personnes.Abstract: This thesis aims at expanding the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) by facilitating the development of applications by people who are not experts in software development. The thesis proposes a new approach to augment IoT applicationsâ semantics and domain expert involvement in context-aware application development. Our approach enables us to manage the changing environment context and generate applications that run in multiple smart environments to provide required actions in diverse settings. Our approach is implemented in a framework (AmI-DEU) that includes the components for IoT application development. AmI- DEU integrates environment services, promotes end-user interaction, and provides the means to represent the application domain, end-user profile, and end-user intentions. The framework enables the definition of IoT applications with a self-described activity intention that contains the required knowledge to achieve the activity. Then, the framework generates Intention as a Context (IaaC), which includes a self-described activity intention with compiled knowledge to be assessed for augmented adaptations in smart environments. AmI-DEU framework semantics adopts ContextAA (Context-Aware Agents) â a platform to provide context-awareness in multiple environments. The framework performs a knowledge compilation by rules and semantic matching to produce autonomic IoT applications to run in ContextAA. AmI-DEU also includes a visual tool for quick application development and deployment to ContextAA. The AmI-DEU GUI adopts the flow metaphor with visual aids to simplify developing applications by allowing step-by-step rule definitions. As part of the experimentation, AmI-DEU includes a testbed for IoT application development. Experimental results show a potential semantic optimization for dynamic IoT applications in smart homes and smart cities. Our approach promotes technology adoption to improve peopleâs well-being and quality of life. This thesis concludes with research directions that the AmI-DEU framework uncovers to achieve pervasive smart environments providing suitable adaptations to support peopleâs intentions
Unsupervised monitoring of an elderly person\u27s activities of daily living using Kinect sensors and a power meter
The need for greater independence amongst the growing population of elderly people has made the concept of âageing in placeâ an important area of research. Remote home monitoring strategies help the elderly deal with challenges involved in ageing in place and performing the activities of daily living (ADLs) independently. These monitoring approaches typically involve the use of several sensors, attached to the environment or person, in order to acquire data about the ADLs of the occupant being monitored.
Some key drawbacks associated with many of the ADL monitoring approaches proposed for the elderly living alone need to be addressed. These include the need to label a training dataset of activities, use wearable devices or equip the house with many sensors. These approaches are also unable to concurrently monitor physical ADLs to detect emergency situations, such as falls, and instrumental ADLs to detect deviations from the daily routine. These are all indicative of deteriorating health in the elderly.
To address these drawbacks, this research aimed to investigate the feasibility of unsupervised monitoring of both physical and instrumental ADLs of elderly people living alone via inexpensive minimally intrusive sensors. A hybrid framework was presented which combined two approaches for monitoring an elderly occupantâs physical and instrumental ADLs. Both approaches were trained based on unlabelled sensor data from the occupantâs normal behaviours. The data related to physical ADLs were captured from Kinect sensors and those related to instrumental ADLs were obtained using a combination of Kinect sensors and a power meter. Kinect sensors were employed in functional areas of the monitored environment to capture the occupantâs locations and 3D structures of their physical activities. The power meter measured the power consumption of home electrical appliances (HEAs) from the electricity panel.
A novel unsupervised fuzzy approach was presented to monitor physical ADLs based on depth maps obtained from Kinect sensors. Epochs of activities associated with each monitored location were automatically identified, and the occupantâs behaviour patterns during each epoch were represented through the combinations of fuzzy attributes. A novel membership function generation technique was presented to elicit membership functions for attributes by analysing the data distribution of attributes while excluding noise and outliers in the data. The occupantâs behaviour patterns during each epoch of activity were then classified into frequent and infrequent categories using a data mining technique. Fuzzy rules were learned to model frequent behaviour patterns. An alarm was raised when the occupantâs behaviour in new data was recognised as frequent with a longer than usual duration or infrequent with a duration exceeding a data-driven value.
Another novel unsupervised fuzzy approach to monitor instrumental ADLs took unlabelled training data from Kinect sensors and a power meter to model the key features of instrumental ADLs. Instrumental ADLs in the training dataset were identified based on associating the occupantâs locations with specific power signatures on the power line. A set of fuzzy rules was then developed to model the frequency and regularity of the instrumental activities tailored to the occupant. This set was subsequently used to monitor new data and to generate reports on deviations from normal behaviour patterns.
As a proof of concept, the proposed monitoring approaches were evaluated using a dataset collected from a real-life setting. An evaluation of the results verified the high accuracy of the proposed technique to identify the epochs of activities over alternative techniques. The approach adopted for monitoring physical ADLs was found to improve elderly monitoring. It generated fuzzy rules that could represent the personâs physical ADLs and exclude noise and outliers in the data more efficiently than alternative approaches. The performance of different membership function generation techniques was compared. The fuzzy rule set obtained from the output of the proposed technique could accurately classify more scenarios of normal and abnormal behaviours.
The approach for monitoring instrumental ADLs was also found to reliably distinguish power signatures generated automatically by self-regulated devices from those generated as a result of an elderly personâs instrumental ADLs. The evaluations also showed the effectiveness of the approach in correctly identifying elderly peopleâs interactions with specific HEAs and tracking simulated upward and downward deviations from normal behaviours. The fuzzy inference system in this approach was found to be robust in regards to errors when identifying instrumental ADLs as it could effectively classify normal and abnormal behaviour patterns despite errors in the list of the used HEAs
Sensor-based datasets for human activity recognition - a systematic review of literature
The research area of ambient assisted living has led to the development of activity recognition
systems (ARS) based on human activity recognition (HAR). These systems improve the quality of life and
the health care of the elderly and dependent people. However, before making them available to end users, it is
necessary to evaluate their performance in recognizing activities of daily living, using data set benchmarks
in experimental scenarios. For that reason, the scientific community has developed and provided a huge
amount of data sets for HAR. Therefore, identifying which ones to use in the evaluation process and which
techniques are the most appropriate for prediction of HAR in a specific context is not a trivial task and
is key to further progress in this area of research. This work presents a systematic review of the literature
of the sensor-based data sets used to evaluate ARS. On the one hand, an analysis of different variables
taken from indexed publications related to this field was performed. The sources of information are journals,
proceedings, and books located in specialized databases. The analyzed variables characterize publications
by year, database, type, quartile, country of origin, and destination, using scientometrics, which allowed
identification of the data set most used by researchers. On the other hand, the descriptive and functional
variables were analyzed for each of the identified data sets: occupation, annotation, approach, segmentation,
representation, feature selection, balancing and addition of instances, and classifier used for recognition.
This paper provides an analysis of the sensor-based data sets used in HAR to date, identifying the most
appropriate dataset to evaluate ARS and the classification techniques that generate better results
Sensor-based datasets for human activity recognition - a systematic review of literature
The research area of ambient assisted living has led to the development of activity recognition
systems (ARS) based on human activity recognition (HAR). These systems improve the quality of life and
the health care of the elderly and dependent people. However, before making them available to end users, it is
necessary to evaluate their performance in recognizing activities of daily living, using data set benchmarks
in experimental scenarios. For that reason, the scientific community has developed and provided a huge
amount of data sets for HAR. Therefore, identifying which ones to use in the evaluation process and which
techniques are the most appropriate for prediction of HAR in a specific context is not a trivial task and
is key to further progress in this area of research. This work presents a systematic review of the literature
of the sensor-based data sets used to evaluate ARS. On the one hand, an analysis of different variables
taken from indexed publications related to this field was performed. The sources of information are journals,
proceedings, and books located in specialized databases. The analyzed variables characterize publications
by year, database, type, quartile, country of origin, and destination, using scientometrics, which allowed
identification of the data set most used by researchers. On the other hand, the descriptive and functional
variables were analyzed for each of the identified data sets: occupation, annotation, approach, segmentation,
representation, feature selection, balancing and addition of instances, and classifier used for recognition.
This paper provides an analysis of the sensor-based data sets used in HAR to date, identifying the most
appropriate dataset to evaluate ARS and the classification techniques that generate better results
A COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE FOR AMBIENT INTELLIGENCE
LâAmbient Intelligence (AmI) Ăš caratterizzata dallâuso di sistemi pervasivi per
monitorare lâambiente e modificarlo secondo le esigenze degli utenti e rispettando
vincoli definiti globalmente. Questi sistemi non possono prescindere da requisiti
come la scalabilitĂ e la trasparenza per lâutente. Una tecnologia che consente di
raggiungere questi obiettivi Ăš rappresentata dalle reti di sensori wireless (WSN),
caratterizzate da bassi costi e bassa intrusivitĂ . Tuttavia, sebbene in grado di
effettuare elaborazioni a bordo dei singoli nodi, le WSN non hanno da sole le capacitĂ
di elaborazione necessarie a supportare un sistema intelligente; dâaltra parte
senza questa attivitĂ di pre-elaborazione la mole di dati sensoriali puĂČ facilmente
sopraffare un sistema centralizzato con unâeccessiva quantitĂ di dettagli superflui.
Questo lavoro presenta unâarchitettura cognitiva in grado di percepire e controllare
lâambiente di cui fa parte, basata su un nuovo approccio per lâestrazione
di conoscenza a partire dai dati grezzi, attraverso livelli crescenti di astrazione.
Le WSN sono utilizzate come strumento sensoriale pervasivo, le cui capacitĂ computazionali
vengono utilizzate per pre-elaborare i dati rilevati, in modo da consentire
ad un sistema centralizzato intelligente di effettuare ragionamenti di alto
livello.
Lâarchitettura proposta Ăš stata utilizzata per sviluppare un testbed dotato degli
strumenti hardware e software necessari allo sviluppo e alla gestione di applicazioni
di AmI basate su WSN, il cui obiettivo principale sia il risparmio energetico. Per
fare in modo che le applicazioni di AmI siano in grado di comunicare con il mondo
esterno in maniera affidabile, per richiedere servizi ad agenti esterni, lâarchitettura
Ăš stata arricchita con un protocollo di gestione distribuita della reputazione.
Ă stata inoltre sviluppata unâapplicazione di esempio che sfrutta le caratteristiche
del testbed, con lâobiettivo di controllare la temperatura in un ambiente
lavorativo. Questâapplicazione rileva la presenza dellâutente attraverso un modulo
per la fusione di dati multi-sensoriali basato su reti bayesiane, e sfrutta questa
informazione in un controllore fuzzy multi-obiettivo che controlla gli attuatori sulla
base delle preferenze dellâutente e del risparmio energetico.Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems are characterized by the use of pervasive
equipments for monitoring and modifying the environment according to usersâ
needs, and to globally defined constraints. Furthermore, such systems cannot ignore
requirements about ubiquity, scalability, and transparency to the user. An
enabling technology capable of accomplishing these goals is represented by Wireless
Sensor Networks (WSNs), characterized by low-costs and unintrusiveness. However,
although provided of in-network processing capabilities, WSNs do not exhibit
processing features able to support comprehensive intelligent systems; on the other
hand, without this pre-processing activities the wealth of sensory data may easily
overwhelm a centralized AmI system, clogging it with superfluous details.
This work proposes a cognitive architecture able to perceive, decide upon, and
control the environment of which the system is part, based on a new approach to
knowledge extraction from raw data, that addresses this issue at different abstraction
levels. WSNs are used as the pervasive sensory tool, and their computational
capabilities are exploited to remotely perform preliminary data processing. A central
intelligent unit subsequently extracts higher-level concepts in order to carry on
symbolic reasoning. The aim of the reasoning is to plan a sequence of actions that
will lead the environment to a state as close as possible to the usersâ desires, taking
into account both implicit and explicit feedbacks from the users, while considering
global system-driven goals, such as energy saving. The proposed conceptual architecture
was exploited to develop a testbed providing the hardware and software
tools for the development and management of AmI applications based on WSNs,
whose main goal is energy saving for global sustainability. In order to make the
AmI system able to communicate with the external world in a reliable way, when
some services are required to external agents, the architecture was enriched with
a distributed reputation management protocol.
A sample application exploiting the testbed features was implemented for addressing
temperature control in a work environment. Knowledge about the userâs
presence is obtained through a multi-sensor data fusion module based on Bayesian
networks, and this information is exploited by a multi-objective fuzzy controller
that operates on actuators taking into account usersâ preference and energy consumption
constraints
Recommended from our members
Enhanced fuzzy finite state machine for human activity modelling and recognition
A challenging key aspect of modelling and recognising human activity is to design a model that can deal with the uncertainty in human behaviour. Several machine learning and deep learning techniques are employed to model the Activity of Daily Living (ADL) representing the human activity. This paper proposes an enhanced Fuzzy Finite State Machine (FFSM) model by combining the classical FFSM with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The learning capability in the LSTM and CNN allows the system to learn the relationship in the temporal human activity data and to identify the parameters of the rule-based system as building blocks of the FFSM through time steps in the learning mode. The learned parameters are then used for generating the fuzzy rules that govern the transitions between the systemâs states representing activities. The proposed enhanced FFSMs were tested and evaluated using two different datasets; a real dataset collected by our research group and a public dataset collected from CASAS smart home project. Using LSTM-FFSM, the experimental results achieved 95.7% and 97.6% for the first dataset and the second dataset, respectively. Once CNN-FFSM was applied to both datasets, the obtained results were 94.2% and 99.3%, respectively
A fog-based hybrid intelligent system for energy saving in smart buildings
In recent years, the widespread diffusion of pervasive sensing devices and the increasing need for reducing energy consumption have encouraged research in the energy-aware management of smart environments. Following this direction, this paper proposes a hybrid intelligent system which exploits a fog-based architecture to achieve energy efficiency in smart buildings. Our proposal combines reactive intelligence, for quick adaptation to the ever-changing environment, and deliberative intelligence, for performing complex learning and optimization. Such hybrid nature allows our system to be adaptive, by reacting in real time to relevant events occurring in the environment and, at the same time, to constantly improve its performance by learning usersâ needs. The effectiveness of our approach is validated in the application scenario of a smart home by extensive experiments on real sensor traces. Experimental results show that our system achieves substantial energy savings in the management of a smart environment, whilst satisfying usersâ needs and preferences
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Fuzzy Finite State Machine for human activity modelling and recognition
Independent living is a housing arrangement designed exclusively for older adults to support them with their Activity of Daily Living (ADL) in a safe and secure environment. The provision of independent living would reduce the cost of social care while elderly residents are kept in their own homes. Therefore, there is a need for an automated system to monitor the residents to be able to understand their activities and only when abnormal activities are identified, provide human support to resolve the issue.
Three main approaches are used for gathering data representing the humanâs activities; ambient sensory device-based, wearable sensory device-based and camera vision device-based. Ambient sensory devices-based systems use sensors such as Passive Infra-Red (PIR) and door entry sensors to capture a userâs presence or absence within a specific area and record them as binary information. Gathering data using these sensory devices are widely accepted, as they are unobtrusive and it does not affect the ADLs. However, wearable sensory devices-based and camera vision device-based approaches are undesirable to many users especially for the older adults users as they more often forget to wear them and due to some privacy concerns.
Recognising and modelling human activities from unobtrusive sensors is a topic addressed in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) research. The research proposed in this thesis aims to recognise and model human activities in an indoor environment based on ambient sensory device-based data. Different methods including statistical, machine learning and deep learning techniques are already researched to address the challenges of recognising and modelling human activities. The research in this thesis is mainly focusing on the application of Fuzzy Finite State Machine (FFSM) for human activities modelling and proposes ways for enhancing the FFSM performance to improve the accuracy of human activity modelling.
In this thesis, three novel contributions are made which are outlined as follows; Firstly, a framework is proposed for combining the learning abilities of Neural Networks (NNs), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with the existing FFSM for human activity modelling and recognition. These models are referred to as NN-FFSM, LSTM-FFSM and CNN-FFSM. Secondly, to obtain the optimal feature representation from the acquired sensory information, relevant features are extracted and fuzzified with the selected membership degrees, these features are then applied to the different enhanced FFSM models. Thirdly, binary data gathered from the ambient sensors including PIR and door entry sensors are represented as greyscale images. A pre-trained Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) such as AlexNet is used to select and extract features from the generated greyscale image for each activity. The selected features are then used as inputs to Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost) and Fuzzy C-means (FCM) classifiers for modelling and recognising the ADL for a single user.
The proposed enhanced FFSM models were tested and evaluated using two different datasets representing the ADL for a single user. The first dataset was collected at the Smart Home facilities at NTU and the second dataset is a public dataset collected from CASAS smart home project
Cyber Physical System for Continuous Evaluation of Fall Risks to Enable Aging-In-Place
Every year, one out of three adults over the age of 65 falls, and about 30% of the falls result in moderate to severe injuries. The high rate of fall-related hospitalizations and the fact that falls are a major source of morbidity and mortality in older adults have motivated extensive interdisciplinary clinical and engineering research with a focus on fall prevention. This research is aimed at developing a medical Cyber Physical System (CPS) composed of a human supervised mobile robot and ambient intelligence sensors to provide continuous evaluation of environmental risks in the home. As a preventive measure to avoid falls, we propose use of mobile robots to detect possible fall risks inside a house. As a step-up to that, we also define a control framework for intelligent, networked mobile robots to semi-autonomously perform assistive and preventive tasks. This framework is integrated in a smart home that provides monitoring and control capabilities of environmental conditions such as objects blocking pathways or uneven surfaces. The main outcome of this work is the realization of this system at Worcester Polytechnic Institute\u27s (WPI) @Home testbed
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