Evaluation of cupboard door sensors for improving activity recognition in the kitchen

Smart home systems are becoming increasingly relevant with every passing year, but while the technology is more available than ever, other issues such as cost and intrusiveness are becoming more apparent. To this end, we consider the types of sensors which are most useful for fine-grained activity recognition in the kitchen in terms of cost, intrusiveness, durability and ease of installation. We install sensors into a conventional residence for testing, and propose a system which meets the design challenges such an environment presents. We show that cupboard door sensors produce useful data about access to certain non mechanical processes and items, while being cheap and simple. We also show that they positively impact the activity recognition performance of our model through their addition, while providing information that we can make use of in future studies.

I. Introduction

Smart home monitoring is becoming an ever increasing focus in many different areas of life, such as health care, consumer technology and security. However, as the need for a system which is practical for real world, large scale deployment increases, the problems which are faced by such systems become ever more apparent and challenging. In general, people are easily dissuaded from in-home monitoring by high costs, visual/physical interference in their own homes and privacy concerns. In addition, ease and cost of installation become an issue when installing systems at scale, and varying domestic configurations require systems to be extremely flexible to meet the widest range of requirements.