10th International Congress on Information and Communication Technology

Authors - Dominic Gibietz, Daniel Helmer, Eicke Godehardt, Heiko Hinkelmann, Thomas Hollstein
Abstract - The ongoing demographic change towards an aging population increases the need for effective solutions to support independent living and ensure the safety of elderly people living alone. Detecting anomalies in the daily routines of these people is a critical task in order to address these challenges and maintain their well-being. This paper proposes an unobtrusive method for anomaly detection using binary sensor data and machine learning. The approach involves a neural network in form of an autoencoder, which evaluates hourly data of each room, including the accumulated residence time, the activity time, and the number of room entries. The system learns individual normal behaviour through online learning and detects deviations from it. Testing and evaluation of the system was carried out using a publicly available dataset and comparing different configurations for the model. A comparison was also made between the use of individual maximum values for each room to normalize the data and uniform values for all rooms, with the former performing significantly better. The results demonstrate that the system can effectively identify the majority of unusual daily routines with a high accuracy, offering potential for improving safety measures for people living alone.