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Spatial recognition of activities for cognitive assistance: realistic scenarios using clinical data from Alzheimer’s patients

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Abstract

The evolution of consumer electronics, telecommunications and computing has empowered ambient intelligence into an emerging field of research bringing new possible solutions to many problems of human life. One of them is the technological assistance of elders who are suffering from a cognitive deficit with the execution of their everyday life activities inside what is called a smart home. To enable this technology, the first challenge to overcome is the recognition of the resident’s activities of daily living (ADLs). This problem consists of inferring the minimal set of possible ongoing ADLs using templates (plans) of activities defined in a library. To successfully achieve that goal, we must exploit constraints of different natures (logical, temporal, etc.) in order to reject a maximal number of hypotheses. However, only a minority of works exploited the elementary spatial aspects related to objects and to their relations in the smart environment. In this paper, we propose a novel recognition model exploiting the fundamental qualitative spatial reasoning approach of Egenhofer to discriminate implausible ongoing activities. Furthermore, the model is validated through extensive testing of realistic scenarios based on clinical trials conducted at our laboratory with both normal and impaired subjects.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Centre de santé et services sociaux (CSSS) of La Baie, the Maison Le Phare of Jonquière and our regional Alzheimer Society for helping us recruiting the participants. Finally, special thanks to our neuropsychologist partner and her graduate students who indirectly worked on this project by supervising the clinical trials with patients.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LIARA Lab, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Chicoutimi, Canada

    Kevin Bouchard, Bruno Bouchard & Abdenour Bouzouane

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  1. Kevin Bouchard
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  2. Bruno Bouchard
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  3. Abdenour Bouzouane
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Correspondence to Kevin Bouchard.

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Bouchard, K., Bouchard, B. & Bouzouane, A. Spatial recognition of activities for cognitive assistance: realistic scenarios using clinical data from Alzheimer’s patients. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 5, 759–774 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-013-0205-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-013-0205-8

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