A Comparison of Two Hidden Markov Approaches to Task Identification in the Home Environment

In today´s working world the elderly are often classified as a set of dependent people and are sometimes neglected by society. One of the ways to determine whether an elderly person is safe in their home is to find out what activities an elderly person is carrying out and give appropriate assistance or institute safeguards. This paper describes the lower tier of a two tiered approach that is being adopted. The higher tier consists of hierarchical sets of plans that model common goals and sub-goals associated with activities in daily life. The lower tier deals with recognition of tasks from the stream of sensor events. Tasks are the lowest level component of a plan. The tasks are modelled using a form of hidden Markov modelling.