Activity Recognition Method for Home-Based Elderly Care Service Based on Random Forest and Activity Similarity

In home-based elderly care service, how to precisely recognize activities is a key issue in the design and implementation of context-aware service for elderly people. Existing research works reveal that those approaches ignore the characteristics of activity diversity, and similarity and the features of activities of elderly people at home, so recognition accuracy of those approaches are not high enough for real-life applications. Thus, in this paper, we first study the types of activities in home-based elderly care service. Then, we propose a two-stage elderly home activity recognition method based on random forest and activity similarity. The method uses improved random forest to obtain a preliminary result in the first stage. Then, the correlation between activity, location, and time is employed to judge the rationality of the result. The similarity of activities is further used to correct the results in the second stage. We set up a series of experiments to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.