Are Smart Homes Adequate for Older Adults with Dementia?

Smart home technologies can enable older adults, including those with dementia, to live more independently in their homes for a longer time. Activity recognition, in combination with anomaly detection, has shown the potential to recognise users' daily activities and detect deviations. However, activity recognition and anomaly detection are not sufficient, as they lack the capacity to capture the progression of patients' habits across the different stages of dementia. To achieve this, smart homes should be enabled to recognise patients' habits and changes in habits, including the loss of some habits. In this study, we first present an overview of the stages that characterise dementia, alongside real-world personas that depict users' behaviours at each stage. Then, we survey the state of the art on activity recognition in smart homes for older adults with dementia, including the literature that combines activity recognition and anomaly detection. We categorise the literature based on goals, stages of dementia, and targeted users. Finally, we justify the necessity for habit recognition in smart homes for older adults with dementia, and we discuss the research challenges related to its implementation.

Multi-sensor dataset of human activities in a smart home environment.

Time series data acquired from sensors deployed in smart homes present valuable information for intelligent systems to learn activity patterns of occupants. With the increasing need to enable people to age in place independently, the availability of such data is key to the development of home monitoring solutions. In this article we describe an unlabelled dataset of measurements collected from multiple environmental sensors placed in a smart home to capture human activities of daily living. Various sensors were used including passive infrared, force sensing resistors, reed switches, mini photocell light sensors, temperature and humidity, and smart plugs. The sensors record data from the user's interactions with the environment, such as indoor movements, pressure applied on the bed, or current consumption when using electrical appliances. Millions of raw sensor data samples were collected continuously at a frequency of 1 Hz over a period of six months between 26 February 2020 and 26 August 2020. The dataset can be useful in the analysis of different methods, including data-driven algorithms for activity or habit recognition. In particular, the research community might be interested in investigating the performance of algorithms when applied on unlabelled datasets and not necessarily on annotated datasets. Furthermore, by applying artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms on such data collected over long periods, it is possible to extract patterns that reveal the user's habits as well as detect changes in the habits. This can benefit in detecting deviations in order to provide timely interventions for patients, e.g., people with dementia.