OPAIEH: An Ontology-based Platform for Activity Identification of the Elderly at Home

Abstract

Recently, the sector of the population older than 60 years of age is growing. The assistance for the elderly at their home allows to increase their autonomy and independence while they are living alone. Several fields have emerged to improve the quality of life of the elderly, and to develop environments that offer help, support and assistance during the realization of their daily activities. The identification of activities is a key piece for the provision of assistance to seniors who live alone. This work is focused on the activity recognition of the elderly who live independently at home. Here is presented OPAIEH, an ontology-based platform for activity identification of the elderly at home. The platform includes the ontological model, which allows a new activity characterization. Also, the platform includes a sensors network, a client device, and web server to perform the recognition of different activities that the elderly do inside their home. Furthermore, the platform generates a set of graphs that shows different statistics and behaviours of the users. In order to perform an experimental test on OPAIEH, a case study was developed as a proof of concept about the use of ontologies for the activity recognition task. The results encourages us to continue our work.