Unobtrusive Activity Recognition of Elderly People Living Alone Using Anonymous Binary Sensors and DCNN

Elderly population (over the age of 60) is predicted to be 1.2 billion by 2025. Most of the elderly people would like to stay alone in their own house due to the high eldercare cost and privacy invasion. Unobtrusive activity recognition is the most preferred solution for monitoring daily activities of the elderly people living alone rather than the camera and wearable devices based systems. Thus, we propose an unobtrusive activity recognition classifier using deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) and anonymous binary sensors that are passive infrared motion sensors and door sensors. We employed Aruba annotated open data set that was acquired from a smart home where a voluntary single elderly woman was living inside for eight months. First, ten basic daily activities, namely, Eating, Bed_to_Toilet, Relax, Meal_Preparation, Sleeping, Work, Housekeeping, Wash_Dishes, Enter_Home, and Leave_Home are segmented with different sliding window sizes, and then converted into binary activity images. Next, the activity images are employed as the ground truth for the proposed DCNN model. The 10-fold cross-validation evaluation results indicated that our proposed DCNN model outperforms the existing models with F₁-score of 0.79 and 0.951 for all ten activities and eight activities (excluding Leave_Home and Wash_Dishes), respectively.