On the applicability of clinical observation tools for human activity annotation

The annotation of human activity is a crucial prerequisite for applying methods of supervised machine learning. It is typically either obtained by live annotation by the participant or by video log analysis afterwards. Both methods, however, suffer from disadvantages when applied in dementia related nursing homes. On the one hand, people suffering from dementia are not able to produce such annotation and on the other hand, video observation requires high technical effort. The research domain of quality of care addresses these issues by providing observation tools that allow the simultaneous live observation of up to eight participants - dementia care mapping (DCM). We developed an annotation scheme based on the popular clinical observation tool DCM to obtain annotation about challenging behaviours. In this paper, we report our experiences with this approach and discuss the applicability of clinical observation tools in the domain of automatic human activity assessment.