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Sensor data fusion for activity monitoring in the PERSONA ambient assisted living project

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Abstract

User activity monitoring is a major problem in ambient assisted living, since it requires to infer new knowledge from collected and fused sensor data while dealing with highly dynamic environments, where devices continuously change their availability and (or) physical location. In the context of the European project PERSONA, we have developed an activity monitoring sub-system characterized by high modularity, little invasiveness of the environment and good responsiveness. In this paper we first illustrate the functional architecture of the proposed solution from a general point of view, discussing the motivations of the design. Then we describe in details the software components—sensor abstraction and integration layer, human posture classification, activity monitor—and the resulting activity monitoring application, presenting also a performance evaluation.

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Notes

  1. More precisely, a TOF camera emits sinusoidal light impulses and measures the phase shift of the returning light for each pixel.

  2. Locality preserving projections by He and Niyogi (2003) and its variants were originally formulated for manifold learning tasks (see the works by Wang and Suter 2006, 2007 for related applications in the context of human monitoring). However, in a recent publication (Wientapper et al. 2009) we showed how LPP may also be used as a classification algorithm, and we revealed its strong connections to LDA.

  3. Parts of the dataset and videos can be downloaded from http://www-past.igd.fraunhofer.de/~fowienta/HumanPosture/index.html.

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Correspondence to Michele Amoretti.

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This work has been partially funded by the EU IST Project PERSONA (FP6 contract N.045459).

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Amoretti, M., Copelli, S., Wientapper, F. et al. Sensor data fusion for activity monitoring in the PERSONA ambient assisted living project. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 4, 67–84 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-011-0095-6

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