Exploiting Affordances in Monitoring a Smart Home

The Internet of Things (IoT), where internet connections are extended to every-day objects, enables collaboration, monitoring, and remote control. An IoT can make a home smart at least in the sense that those in it can be monitored. The question arises of how much and what kind of data are needed to monitor a person as they move about a smart home. This paper focuses on affordances, manifest possibilities for action provided by the environment (e.g., the appearance of a doorknob). Our thesis is that, since the same things are affordances for the monitored and monitoring persons, a little data goes a long way in monitoring a subject’s interaction with affordances. This paper describes a scaled-down model of a floor in a smart home equipped with only passive infrared (PIR) motion sensors where nevertheless the data allows high-level interpretation of the subject’s activities on that floor.