Fuzzy Ontology Based Activity Recognition for Assistive Health Care Using Smart Home

Assistive health care system is a viable solution for elderly care to offer independent living. Such health care systems are feasible through smart homes, which are intended to enhance the living quality of the occupant. Activities of daily living (ADL) are considered in the design of a smart home and are extended to abnormality detection in the case of health care. Abnormality in occupant behavior is the deviation of ongoing activity with that of the built activity model. Generally, supervised machine learning strategies or knowledge engineering strategies are employed in the process of activity modeling. Supervised machine learning approaches incur overheads in annotating the dataset, while the knowledge modeling approaches incur overhead by being dependent on the domain expert for occupant specific knowledge. The proposed approach on the other hand, employs an unsupervised machine learning strategy to readily extract knowledge from unlabelled data using contextual pattern clustering and subsequently represents it as ontology activity model. Ontology offers enhanced activity recognition through its semantically clear representation and reasoning, it has restriction in handling temporal data. Hence, this article in addition to unsupervised modeling focuses at enabling temporal reasoning within ontology using fuzzy logic. The proposed fuzzy ontology activity recognition (FOAR) framework represents an activity model as a fuzzy temporal ontology. Fuzzy SWRL rules modeled within ontology aid activity recognition and abnormality detection for health care. The experimental results show that the proposed FOAR has better performance in abnormality detection than that of the existing systems.