Daily living activity recognition with ECHONET Lite appliances and motion sensors

Recently, IoT (Internet of Things) technologies have been attracting increasing attention. Among many applications of IoT, homes can be the most promising target. One of the purposes to deploy IoT in homes is automatic recognition of activities of daily living (ADLs). It is expected that ADL recognition in homes enables many new services such as elderly people monitoring and low energy appliance control. In existing studies on ADL recognition, however, it is hard to build a system to acquire data for ADL recognition in terms of installation cost. In this paper, we propose a method that reduces costs of the ADL recognition system by using ECHONET Lite-ready appliances which are expected to be widely spread in the future. ECHONET Lite is a communication protocol for control and sensor networks in smart-homes and standardized as ISO/IEC-4-3. The proposed method utilizes information (e.g., on/off state) from appliances and motion sensors attached to them as features and recognizes ADLs through machine learning. To evaluate the proposed method, we collected data in our smart-home testbed while several participants are living there. As a result, the proposed method achieved about 68% classification accuracy for 9 different activities.