A Low-cost Activity Recognition System for Smart Homes

Pervasive or ubiquitous computing environments have become very common nowadays. The vision of pervasive computing is given by Mark Weiser in 1991. Pervasive computing offers such computing environments in which users are offered their desired services without requiring their dedicated or substantial attention. It supports users to achieve their desired goals/task with minimal user interaction. The applications of pervasive computing can be seen in various sub-domains including mobile and ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, location-aware systems, context-aware systems and smart environments (e.g. smart offices and smart homes). Sensing physical phenomena, human activity recognition, understanding and analysis can substantially play its role in realizing smart environments. In recent years, the domain of human activities recognition has got significant attention from researchers due its potential applications in smart environments. In the literature of smart environments, it is envisioned that a system could offer the best services to its users only if it is able to understand and recognize the actions/activities being performed by the user while present in the smart environment. Consequently, in this paper a low-cost system to recognize human activities is proposed. The proof-of-concept implementation of the proposed system is carried out and its usability is also conducted. The usability study results show that the proposed system is user friendly and significantly improves the user experience of smart home users.