An Ontology-based Problem-logic Driven Approach towards the Activity Awareness for Elderly Care

Abstract

The same activity under different user situations in the elderly care system may lead to different intelligent system response, since user needs vary with the changing situations. Activity awareness (AA) emphasizes that systems intelligently respond to user needs by aware the user-performed activities which is denoted and comprehended according to various user situations. But most current AA technics use similar patterns retrieved from the growing historical data, neglecting the situation change, called dataset driven. Thus, an aptly approach is needed in support of AA systems to handle various activity denotations in different user situations. Responding to the problem, this paper proposes an Ontology-based Problem-logic driven approach (OPL) to enhance the AA system by denoting user activities with the problem logic according to user-oriented denoted problem domains, where the AA system can seamlessly integrate with inferring for intelligent system response. Specifically, denoted problem domain and logic are proposed to support the OPL concepts, while activity graph is formed to support the intelligent system response based on the annotated problem logic. With the OPL, systems can directly target at the changing situations with rule-based inferring. A case study is performed upon the scenario retrieved from a European elderly care project, where a proof-of-concept prototype is established to confirm the validity of the OPL approach.