Activity Recognition Through Complex Event Processing: First Findings

The activities of daily living of a patient in a smart home environment can be detected to a large extent by the real-time analysis of characteristics of the habitat's electrical consumption. However, reasoning over the conduct of these activities occurs at a much higher level of abstraction than what the sensors generally produce. In this paper, we leverage the concept of Complex Event Processing (CEP), in which low-level data streams are progressively transformed into higher-level ones, to the task of activity recognition. We show how the use of an appropriate representation for each level of abstraction can greatly simplify the process. We also report on the use of an existing event stream processor to successfully implement the complete chain, from low-level sensor data up to a sequence of discrete and high-level actions.