Management of Uncertainty and Spatio-Temporal Aspects for Monitoring and Diagnosis in a Smart Home

The health system in developed countries is facing a problem of scalability in order to accommodate the increased proportion of the elderly population. Scarce resources cannot be sustained unless innovative technology is considered to provide health care in a more effective way. The Smart Home provides preventive and assistive technology to vulnerable sectors of the population. Much research and development has been focused on the technological side (e.g., sensors and networks) but less effort has been invested in the capability of the Smart Home to intelligently monitor situations of interest and act in the best interest of the occupants. In this article we model a Smart Home scenario, using knowledge in the form of Event-Condition-Action rules together with a new inference scheme which incorporates spatio-temporal reasoning and uncertainty. A reasoning system called RIMER, has been extended to permit the monitoring of situations according to the place where they occur and the specific order and duration of the activities. The system allows for the specification of uncertainty both in terms of knowledge representation and credibility of the conclusions that can be achieved in terms of the evidence available.