CBR for SmartHouse Technology

SmartHouse technology offers devices that help the elderly and people with disabilities to live independently in their homes. This paper presents our experiences from a pilot project applying case-based reasoning techniques to match the needs of the elderly and those with disabilities to SmartHouse technology. The SmartHouse problem is decomposed into sub-tasks, and generalised concepts added for each sub-task. This decomposition and generalisation enables multiple case reuse employing a standard decision tree index based iterative retrieval strategy. Documented real situations were used to create a small case base. A prototype implemented using ReCall 1 with Tcl script is evaluated empirically using leave-one-out testing, and separately with the domain expert on newly created test cases. Results show the generated solutions to be comparable to those of a domain expert. Importantly, the iterative retrieval strategy employing multiple indices generated solutions that were significantly better compared to a best match retrieval without indices.