Abnormal human behavioral pattern detection in assisted living environments

Abstract

In recent years, there is a growing interest about assisted living environments especially for the elderly who live alone, due to the increasing number of aged people. In order for them to live safe and healthy, we need to detect abnormal behavior that may cause severe and emergent situations for the elderly. In this work, we suggest a method that detects abnormal behavior using wireless sensor networks. We model an episode that is a series of events, which includes spatial and temporal information about the subject being monitored. We define a similarity scoring function that compares two episodes taking into consideration temporal aspects. We propose a way to determine a threshold to divide episodes into two groups that reduces wrong classification. Weights on individual functions that consist the similarity function are determined experimentally so that they can produce the good results in terms of area under curve in receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve.