Can Appliances Understand the Behaviour of Elderly via Machine Learning? A Feasibility Study

Over the last half decade, fast development of the Internet of Things and machine learning made it feasible to leverage the power of artificial intelligence to facilitate a variety of intelligent systems in smart home. Nevertheless, the studies on designing specific computing technologies for helping elderly to enjoy a comfortable, convenient, and independent daily life are extremely limited. On the one hand, there are increasingly growing demands from the ageing society to implement the cutting edge technology enabling a better life quality for the elderly. On the other hand, there is still a lack on fundamental investigations, applicable infrastructures, and advanced data-driven frameworks. To this end, we propose a novel machine framework for analysing the daily life behaviour of elderly – all in this study are living alone – by the data collected from their home appliances, i. e., television and refrigerator. First, the inter-event intervals for the use of the appliances collected in one month from 76 elderly are the raw data to describe the behaviours. Then, three machine learning paradigms are investigated and compared, which include ‘classic’ machine learning methods and the state-of-the-art deep learning approaches. Finally, we indicate the current findings and limitations in this feasibility study. Experimental results demonstrate that, our proposed method can reach performance peak at an unweighted average recall of 58.7 % (chance level: 50.0 %) in a subject-independent test for classifying symptom/non-symptom days.