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PUCK: an automated prompting system for smart environments: toward achieving automated prompting—challenges involved

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Abstract

The growth in popularity of smart environments has been quite steep in the last decade and so has the demand for smart health assistance systems. A smart home-based prompting system can enhance these technologies to deliver in-home interventions to users for timely reminders or brief instructions describing the way a task should be carried out for successful completion. This technology is in high demand given the desire of people who have physical or cognitive limitations to live independently in their homes. In this paper, with the introduction of the “PUCK” prompting system, we take an approach to automate prompting-based interventions without any predefined rule sets or user feedback. Unlike other approaches, we use simple off-the-shelf sensors and learn the timing for prompts based on real data that are collected with volunteer participants in our smart home test bed. The data mining approaches taken to solve this problem come with the challenge of an imbalanced class distribution that occurs naturally in the data. We propose a variant of an existing sampling technique, SMOTE, to deal with the class imbalance problem. To validate the approach, a comparative analysis with cost-sensitive learning is performed.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the United States National Institutes of Health Grant R01EB009675 and National Science Foundation Grant CRI-0852172.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University, EME 130 Spokane Street, Box 642752, Pullman, WA, 99164-2752, USA

    Barnan Das

  2. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University, EME 121 Spokane Street, Box 642752, Pullman, WA, 99164-2752, USA

    Diane J. Cook

  3. Department of Psychology, Washington State University, Johnson Tower 312, P.O. Box 644820, Pullman, WA, 99164-4820, USA

    Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe

  4. Department of Psychology, Washington State University, Johnson Tower 321, Pullman, WA, 99164-4820, USA

    Adriana M. Seelye

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  1. Barnan Das
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  2. Diane J. Cook
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  3. Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe
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  4. Adriana M. Seelye
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Correspondence to Barnan Das.

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Das, B., Cook, D.J., Schmitter-Edgecombe, M. et al. PUCK: an automated prompting system for smart environments: toward achieving automated prompting—challenges involved. Pers Ubiquit Comput 16, 859–873 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-011-0445-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-011-0445-6

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