Automatic Control Engineering
Long-term deviation detection in human behavior
Published on - 2021 IEEE 17th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE)
World population ageing causes an important increase of people needing specific health care and monitoring. Dedicated institutions exist, but most of the elderly prefer to keep their autonomy for economic and personal reasons. To ensure a good quality of life and health to this population, Health at Home (HaH) solutions are explored. Many works focus on monitoring smart home inhabitant behavior to detect changes which might be due to health problems. These approaches are efficient to detect accident or short-term diseases such as a cold or influenza but tend to detect too tardily diseases which provoke slow declines in behavior. This is a problem as the elderly are likely to suffer from such troubles and early detection allows for better diagnosis and may help to prevent or reduce future worsening. In this paper, a novel approach for the detection of long-term behavior changes is introduced. It focuses on activity duration as this indicator is influenced by most diseases and give clear information about the inhabitant health status. This paper proposes data forecasting to detect future anomalies to assess existence of evolution in the current behavior. Information is sent to medical staff to refine their prognostic and adapt their treatment or call for a medical appointment. A case study based on a real smart home simulating a worst-case scenario attests for the efficiency of the approach and its resilience.