Dynamic sensor event segmentation for real-time activity recognition in a smart home context

Activity recognition is fundamental to many of the services envisaged in pervasive computing and ambient intelligence scenarios. However, delivering sufficiently robust activity recognition systems that could be deployed with confidence in an arbitrary real-world setting remains an outstanding challenge. Developments in wireless, inexpensive and unobtrusive sensing devices have enabled the capture of large data volumes, upon which a variety of machine learning techniques have been applied in order to facilitate interpretation of and inference upon such data. Much of the documented research in this area has in the main focused on recognition across pre-segmented sensor data. Such approaches are insufficient for near real-time analysis as is required for many services, such as those envisaged by ambient assisted living. This paper presents a novel near real-time sensor segmentation approach that incorporates the notions of both sensor and time correlation.