Building an acoustic-based event recognition system for smart homes is a challenging task due to the lack of high-level structures in environmental sounds. In particular, the selection of effective features is still an open problem. We make an important step toward this goal by showing that the combination of Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, ZeroCrossing Rate, and Discrete Wavelet Transform...

With the rapid growth of the population and the increase in the elderly age group, there is a need to improve and maintain an independent, secure healthy lifestyle. A possible method to address this need is to apply intelligent technology using machine learning techniques in smart homes to remotely monitor an individual’ s activities. The MavHome project uses a system of basic sensors to monito...

Microgrid works as a local energy provider for domestic buildings to reduce energy expenses and gas emissions by utilising distributed energy resources (DERs). The rapid advances in computing and communication capabilities enable the concept smart buildings become possible. Most energy-consuming household tasks do not need to be performed at specific times but rather within a preferred time. If...

OBJECTIVES To discuss how current research in the area of smart homes and ambient assisted living will be influenced by the use of big data. METHODS A scoping review of literature published in scientific journals and conference proceedings was performed, focusing on smart homes, ambient assisted living and big data over the years 2011-2014. RESULTS The health and social care market has lagg...

A large body of research has addressed many issues in smart environments, but few have taken a user-centric approach. We believe that one of the main reasons that smart environments are still largely unrealized is because research is technology-centric, with inadequate focus on users. Because everyone will use smart environments, it is important to study a variety of potential users. To help br...

Porto, the institutional repository of the Politecnico di Torino, is provided by the University Library and the IT-Services. The aim is to enable open access to all the world. Please share with us how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Summary. The impact of electricity consumption in buildings on the overall energy budget of European and North-American states is steadily growing and...

GPS Calibrated Ad-Hoc Localization for Geosocial Networking p. 52 Ontology-Enabled Activity Learning and Model Evolution in Smart Homes p. 67 Support Vector Machines for Inhabitant Identification in Smart Houses p. 83 Towards Non-intrusive Sleep Pattern Recognition in Elder Assistive Environment p. 96 Ubiquitous Services and Applications The Making of a Dataset for Smart Spaces p. 110 Introduct...

Roger W h itaker Cardiff University ously wash floods of information over individuals . Both personal devices (mobile computers, smartphones, smart cars, and smart homes) and public ICT systems (digital signage and smart cities) create and share this data, making it difficult for the individual to allocate his or her attention to the right things at the rigt time. Given this overabundance of in...

Pervasive computing offers an unprecedented opportunity to unobtrusively monitor behavior and use the large amount of collected data to perform analysis of activity-based behavioral patterns. In this paper, we introduce the notion of an activity curve, which represents an abstraction of an individual's normal daily routine based on automatically-recognized activities. We propose methods to dete...