Main Steps of Human Behavior Sensing and Understanding

Human behavior sensing and understanding is a complex process that can be roughly characterized by four main steps, including the following: (1) to choose appropriate sensors to monitor and capture a user’s behavior along with the state change of the environment; (2) to collect, store, and process collected information through data analysis techniques and/or knowledge representation formalisms at appropriate levels of abstraction; (3) to extract features in a way that different behaviors can be distinguished accordingly; and (4) to select or develop reasoning/classification algorithms to infer behaviors from sensor data. For each individual task, a number of methods, technologies, and tools are available for use. It is often the case that the selection of a method used for one task is dependent on the method of another task. We present the comprehensive methods used for each of these steps in the following sections.