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

Inferring Complex Activities for Context-aware Systems within Smart Environments

The rising ageing population worldwide and the prevalence of age-related conditions such as physical fragility, mental impairments and chronic diseases have significantly impacted the quality of life and caused a shortage of health and care services. Over-stretched healthcare providers are leading to a paradigm shift in public healthcare provisioning. Thus, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) using Smart Homes (SH) technologies has been rigorously investigated to help address the aforementioned problems. Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a critical component in AAL systems which enables applications such as just-in-time assistance, behaviour analysis, anomalies detection and emergency notifications. This thesis is aimed at investigating challenges faced in accurately recognising Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) performed by single or multiple inhabitants within smart environments. Specifically, this thesis explores five complementary research challenges in HAR. The first study contributes to knowledge by developing a semantic-enabled data segmentation approach with user-preferences. The second study takes the segmented set of sensor data to investigate and recognise human ADLs at multi-granular action level; coarse- and fine-grained action level. At the coarse-grained actions level, semantic relationships between the sensor, object and ADLs are deduced, whereas, at fine-grained action level, object usage at the satisfactory threshold with the evidence fused from multimodal sensor data is leveraged to verify the intended actions. Moreover, due to imprecise/vague interpretations of multimodal sensors and data fusion challenges, fuzzy set theory and fuzzy web ontology language (fuzzy-OWL) are leveraged. The third study focuses on incorporating uncertainties caused in HAR due to factors such as technological failure, object malfunction, and human errors. Hence, existing studies uncertainty theories and approaches are analysed and based on the findings, probabilistic ontology (PR-OWL) based HAR approach is proposed. The fourth study extends the first three studies to distinguish activities conducted by more than one inhabitant in a shared smart environment with the use of discriminative sensor-based techniques and time-series pattern analysis. The final study investigates in a suitable system architecture with a real-time smart environment tailored to AAL system and proposes microservices architecture with sensor-based off-the-shelf and bespoke sensing methods. The initial semantic-enabled data segmentation study was evaluated with 100% and 97.8% accuracy to segment sensor events under single and mixed activities scenarios. However, the average classification time taken to segment each sensor events have suffered from 3971ms and 62183ms for single and mixed activities scenarios, respectively. The second study to detect fine-grained-level user actions was evaluated with 30 and 153 fuzzy rules to detect two fine-grained movements with a pre-collected dataset from the real-time smart environment. The result of the second study indicate good average accuracy of 83.33% and 100% but with the high average duration of 24648ms and 105318ms, and posing further challenges for the scalability of fusion rule creations. The third study was evaluated by incorporating PR-OWL ontology with ADL ontologies and Semantic-Sensor-Network (SSN) ontology to define four types of uncertainties presented in the kitchen-based activity. The fourth study illustrated a case study to extended single-user AR to multi-user AR by combining RFID tags and fingerprint sensors discriminative sensors to identify and associate user actions with the aid of time-series analysis. The last study responds to the computations and performance requirements for the four studies by analysing and proposing microservices-based system architecture for AAL system. A future research investigation towards adopting fog/edge computing paradigms from cloud computing is discussed for higher availability, reduced network traffic/energy, cost, and creating a decentralised system. As a result of the five studies, this thesis develops a knowledge-driven framework to estimate and recognise multi-user activities at fine-grained level user actions. This framework integrates three complementary ontologies to conceptualise factual, fuzzy and uncertainties in the environment/ADLs, time-series analysis and discriminative sensing environment. Moreover, a distributed software architecture, multimodal sensor-based hardware prototypes, and other supportive utility tools such as simulator and synthetic ADL data generator for the experimentation were developed to support the evaluation of the proposed approaches. The distributed system is platform-independent and currently supported by an Android mobile application and web-browser based client interfaces for retrieving information such as live sensor events and HAR results

Code, space and everyday life

In this paper we examine the role of code (software) in the spatial formation of collective life. Taking the view that human life and coded technology are folded into one another, we theorise space as ontogenesis. Space, we posit, is constantly being bought into being through a process of transduction – the constant making anew of a domain in reiterative and transformative practices - as an incomplete solution to a relational problem. The relational problem we examine is the ongoing encounter between individuals and environment where the solution, to a greater or lesser extent, is code. Code, we posit, is diversely embedded in collectives as coded objects, coded infrastructure, coded processes and coded assemblages. These objects, infrastructure, processes and assemblages possess technicity, that is, unfolding or evolutive power to make things happen; the ability to mediate, supplement, augment, monitor, regulate, operate, facilitate, produce collective life. We contend that when the technicity of code is operationalised it transduces one of three forms of hybrid spatial formations: code/space, coded space and backgrounded coded space. These formations are contingent, relational, extensible and scaleless, often stretched out across networks of greater or shorter length. We demonstrate the coded transduction of space through three vignettes – each a day in the life of three people living in London, UK, tracing the technical mediation of their interactions, transactions and mobilities. We then discuss how code becomes the relational solution to five different classes of problems – domestic living, travelling, working, communicating, and consuming

Augmenting objects at home through programmable sensor tokens: A design journey

End-user development for the home has been gaining momentum in research. Previous works demonstrate feasibility and potential but there is a lack of analysis of the extent of technology needed and its impact on the diversity of activities that can be supported. We present a design exploration with a tangible end-user toolkit for programming smart tokens embedding different sensing technologies. Our system allows to augment physical objects with smart tags and use trigger-action programming with multiple triggers to define smart behaviors. We contribute through a field-oriented study that provided insights on (i) household's activities as emerging from people's lived experience in terms of high-level goals, their ephemerality or recurrence, and the types of triggers, actions and interactions with augmented objects, and (ii) the programmability needed for supporting desired behaviors. We conclude that, while trigger action covers most scenarios, more advanced programming and direct interaction with physical objects spur novel uses.This work was supported by the 2015 UC3M Mobility Grant, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (TIN2014-56534-R, CREAx) and by the Academy of Finland (286440, Evidence)

Portable technology and multi-domain energy practices

This article complements the concept of embedded security by proposing disembedded security to capture consumers’ energy practices when travelling across multiple domains of energy accessibility. Consumer mobility outside the home produces misalignments between infrastructure and portable technology experienced as ‘hysteresis of the battery’. Hysteresis captures how respondents are subject to ‘unpleasant unpredictability’ about battery-based technology and infrastructure, which spurs hermeneutic reflection about energy, location and sociality. Multi-domain energy practices therefore bring energy consumers to ‘reembed’ or create a sense of psychological comfort on the move. Charge levels on battery icons not only structure daily patterns of consumer life through planning efforts but become interpretively entangled in issues of duration, distance and sociality as energy demands in portable technology push consumers to avoid disruption

Ctrl Shift: How Crip Alt Ctrl Designers Change the Game and Reimagine Access

My journey as a disabled arts practitioner has been one of invention, hacking, and re-imagining what input systems could be. I have created my own modalities for creating work, rather than relying on commercially available options. This is a common practice within the disabled community, as individuals often modify and hack their surroundings to make them more usable. For example, ADAPT activists took sledgehammers to smash curb cuts and poured curb ramps with cement bags, ultimately leading to the widespread adoption of curb cuts as a standard architectural feature. As Yergeau notes, this type of "criptastic hacking" represents a creative resistance.(Yergeau, 2012) My interfaces and art projects are a combination of science fiction world-building, technology prototyping, and experimentation with novel ways of experiencing the world that work for my ability. I have been building interactive objects for over 20 years, and my bespoke controller games are both pieces I find comfortable to play and conceptual proposals that I share with the games community to spark consideration for alternative ways of interacting with games culture. This interdisciplinary design research herein crosses a range of disciplines, drawing inspiration from radical forms of cognitive science, games studies, feminist studies, HCI, crip technoscience, radical science fiction, disability studies, and making practices. What has emerged through studying my own practice and the practices of others during this research is a criptastic design framework for creating playful experiences. My research aims to gain a deeper understanding of the ways that hacking and remaking the world manifests as modifications to the design process itself. I created four versions of a physical alt ctrl game and conducted a design study with disabled artists and alt ctrl game creators. The game, Bot Party, was developed through a series of public exhibitions and explored my relationship between criptastic bespoke interface design and embodied experiences of group play. Bot Party involves physical interaction among players in groups to understand my own ways of designing, while the study looks three other disabled designers to understand the ways in which their process is similar or different to my own. By conducting this work, I aim to contribute to the larger conversation within the games studies community about the importance of accessibility and inclusivity in game design. The results highlight the need for continued exploration and development in this area, specifically in design methods. The study’s findings as they relate to my own practice revealed the importance of considering a set of values and design processes in relation to disability when creating games and playful experiences. With this perspective, I propose an initial framework that outlines possible key themes for disabled game designers. Using values as a starting point for creating deeply accessible games, this framework serves as a starting point for future research into accessible game design. This framework seeks to subvert the notion that accessibility is a list of UX best practices, audio descriptions, captions, and haptic additions and moves towards embedding within game design the values and practices used by disabled designers from the outset of the creative process. Access can be a creative framework. An important point to make is that my efforts to do a PhD resist the academic ableism limiting the participation of people who are not from a normative background. The act of creating this PhD has eaten at the edge of my ability, and the research here was often conducted in pain under extremely trying circumstances. This perspective is relevant because it often informed my design choices and thinking. Additionally, it was conducted at a university where I experienced active discrimination from members of staff who simply refused to believe in disabilities they could not see, and in one case writing down my disability was, “self-ascribed.” To work, I had to move outside the academy and seek out workshops which gave me accessible, ergonomic equipment as is discussed in the Bot Party section. This bears mentioning because it reflects on how threatening disabilities can be within academic settings and how even providing basic levels of accessibility remains a challenge for academic institutions. The above framework could benefit academia if used to redesign postgraduate academic research practices within the academy from a place of Crip-informed pedagogy. This is future work that this academic researcher hopes to explore in depth within their academic journey. It is important to note, much of the most relevant research to this thesis around disability studies and technology has emerged in recent years and as a result, was included iteratively in the literature review. It has informed the third study and my iterative design practice as part of the journey; however, I began this work before much of the writing in the literature review existed, including the creation of Bot Party’s first iterations. Finding this scholarship and these authors has been a kinning. Kinship, according to Gavin Van Horn, “can be considered a noun…shared and storied relations and memories that inhere in people and places; or more metaphorical imaginings that unite us to faith traditions, cultures, countries, or the planet…Perhaps this kinship-in-action should be called kinning.” (Horn et al., 2021) Kinning happened throughout this work and this thesis served me as a place for discovery, contemplation, and empowerment. It is my hope sections of it will serve this function for others within my community. I found kinship with other authors working in the field of disability studies and technology, particularly with Alison Kafer, who offers a critique of Donna Haraway's cyborg in her book "Feminist Queer Crip." (Kafer, 2013) Kafer's work highlights the limitations of Haraway's cyborg as a figure of empowerment for marginalized bodies and identities, and instead advocates for a crip-queer-feminist perspective on technology and embodiment. Additionally, the author has also found resonance in the work of Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsh, whose work in disability studies and HCI has been instrumental in shaping this research. Specifically, their concept of "crip technoscience" has been a key framework for understanding technology creation by disabled technologists. (Hamraie and Fritsch, 2019) Overall, it is my hope that this thesis will serve as a generative resource for others within the community on this journey, particularly for those who are working towards a more inclusive and intersectional understanding of technology and embodiment