Online activity recognition and daily habit modeling for solitary elderly through indoor position-based stigmergy

Abstract This paper concerns the issue of monitoring elderly behavior in the context of ambient assisted living (AAL). Under the framework of online daily habit modeling (ODHM), we employ the emergent representation for activities of daily living (ADLs) with position-based stigmergy, and then combine it with convolution neural networks (CNNs) to accomplish the tasks of recognizing ADLs. In addition, we propose a new paradigm of activity summarization with the robustness to break interruptions. Radio tomographic imaging (RTI) is promoted as a simple yet flexible way of facilitating the required position-based stigmergy. Such position-based AAL systems can benefit the advantages of having no need any sophisticated domain models in analyzing and understanding ADLs while no burden training is involved in ODHM. Moreover, the emergent based data aggregation and deep learning of CNN together allow the recognition of ADLs at a fine-grained level, which contributes to the performance improvement of ODHM. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.