Comprehensive Ontological Model for Senior Wellness Activity Recognition in Smart Homes

Abstract

There are several works in the field of smart homes for healthcare, with different types of sensors used to monitor medical, behavioral and environmental parameters for patients. In the context of smart home for the elderly, the use of sensors needs to be adapted to respect the privacy of elders and to work passively without the need for caregiver assistance. Most research in this area focused on activity recognition (e.g. eating, sleeping, watching TV, etc.) which may be defined as the identification of a sequence of actions (e.g. using microwave, lying down, etc.). In this chapter, we propose a comprehensive ontological model for well-being activity recognition in smart home. Our approach takes into account different aspects of the well-being context such as patient profile, object being used to perform the activity, the time of running the activity, its location, etc. In order to validate the proposed ontology and reason on it, we perform a set of queries and inference rules.