Using case-based reasoning to detect risk scenarios of elderly people living alone at home

Abstract

In today’s ageing societies, the proportion of elderly people living alone in their own homes is dramatically increasing. Smart homes provide the appropriate environment for keeping them independent and, therefore, enhancing their quality of life. One of the most important requirements of these systems is that they have to provide a pervasive environment without disrupting elderly people’s daily activities. The present paper introduces a CBR agent used within a commercial Smart Home system, designed for detecting domestic accidents that may lead to serious complications if the elderly resident is not attended quickly. The approach is based on cases composed of event sequences. Each event sequence represents the different locations visited by the resident during his/her daily activities. Using this approach, the system can decide whether the current sequence represent an unsafe scenario or not. It does so by comparing the current sequence with previously stored sequences. Several experiments have been conducted with different CBR agent configurations in order to test this approach. Results from these experiments show that the proposed approach is able to detect unsafe scenarios.