Human Activity Discovery and Recognition Using Probabilistic Finite-State Automata

Abstract

Ambient assisted living and smart home technologies are a good way to take care of dependent people whose number will increase in the future. They allow the discovery and the recognition of human’s activities of daily living (ADLs) in order to take care of people by keeping them in their home. In order to consider the human behavior nondeterminism, probabilistic approaches are used despite difficulties encountered in model generation and probabilistic indicators computing. In this article, a global method based on probabilistic finite-state automata and the definition of the normalized likelihood and perplexity is proposed to manage ADLs discovery and recognition. In order to reduce the computational complexity, some results about a simplified normalized likelihood computation are proved. A real case study showing the efficiency of the proposed method is discussed. Note to Practitioners —This article is motivated by the problem of the automatic recognition of activities that are daily performed by elderly or disabled people in a smart dwelling. The set of activities to be recognized is defined by a medical staff (e.g., to prepare meal, to do housework, to take leisure, etc.) and correspond to pathologies that have to be monitored by doctors (e.g., loss of memory, loss of mobility, etc.). The proposed method is based on a systematic procedure of offline construction of a model for each activity to be monitored (the activity discovering step). The online recognition of activities actually performed (the activity recognition step) is afterward based on these models of activities. Since the human behavior is nondeterministic, and may even be irrational, probabilistic activity models are built from a learning database. In the same way, probabilistic indicators are used for determining online the most probable activities actually performed. The efficiency of the proposed approach is illustrated through a case study performed in a smart living lab.