New Linguistic Description Approach for Time Series and Its Application to Bed Restlessness Monitoring for Eldercare

Time-series analysis has been an active area of research for years, with important applications in forecasting or discovery of hidden information such as patterns or anomalies in observed data. In recent years, the use of time-series analysis techniques for the generation of descriptions and summaries in natural language of any variable, such as temperature, heart rate, or CO
₂
emission has received increasing attention. Natural language has been recognized as more effective than traditional graphical representations of numerical data in many cases, in particular, in situations where a large amount of data needs to be inspected or when the user lacks the necessary background and skills to interpret it. In this article, we describe a novel mechanism to generate linguistic descriptions of time series using natural language and fuzzy logic techniques. The proposed method generates quality summaries capturing the time-series features that are relevant for a user in a particular application, and can be easily customized for different domains. This approach has been successfully applied to the generation of linguistic descriptions of bed restlessness data from residents at TigerPlace (Columbia, MO, USA), which is used as a case study to illustrate the modeling process and show the quality of the descriptions obtained.