Human activity recognition in pervasive single resident smart homes: State of art

The increasing number of elderly persons, in addition to the lack of infrastructures designed to manage them brings an awareness of the importance of maintaining them at home by developing assistive technologies. Recent research on the latter focused on Human Activity Recognition (HAR). HAR aims to recognize the sequence of actions by a specific resident at home using sensor readings. In eldercare applications, HAR allows for a continuous evaluation of older people physical and cognitive capabilities by monitoring the completion of their Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). After the recognition step, assistive technologies may intervene to provide them with the necessary support to live independently at home. Most of the work in single resident HAR has been done in computer vision. Because, HAR is generally performed in a private setting (i.e. smart homes), the camera based solution would not be suitable due to human privacy concerns. Recently, many researchers are interested in the use of pervasive sensors to recognize single resident ADLs. This paper reviews recent approaches applied for HAR in pervasive single resident smart homes. It presents the latest developments and highlights the open issues in this field.