Behavioral Differences Between Subject Groups Identified Using Smart Homes and Change Point Detection

With the arrival of the internet of things, smart environments are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our everyday lives. Sensor data collected from smart home environments can provide unobtrusive, longitudinal time series data that are representative of the smart home resident's routine behavior and how this behavior changes over time. When longitudinal behavioral data are available from multiple smart home residents, differences between groups of subjects can be investigated. Group-level discrepancies may help isolate behaviors that manifest in daily routines due to a health concern or major lifestyle change. To acquire such insights, we propose an algorithmic framework based on change point detection called Behavior Change Detection for Groups (BCD-G). We hypothesize that, using BCD-G, we can quantify and characterize differences in behavior between groups of individual smart home residents. We evaluate our BCD-G framework using one month of continuous sensor data for each of fourteen smart home residents, divided into two groups. All subjects in the first group are diagnosed with cognitive impairment. The second group consists of cognitively healthy, age-matched controls. Using BCD-G, we identify differences between these two groups, such as how impairment affects patterns of performing activities of daily living and how clinically-relevant behavioral features, such as in-home walking speed, differ for cognitively-impaired individuals. With the unobtrusive monitoring of smart home environments, clinicians can use BCD-G for remote identification of behavior changes that are early indicators of health concerns.