Employing entropy measures to identify visitors in multi-occupancy environments

Human activity recognition is concerned with identifying the specific movement of a person based on sensor data. In recent years, many different techniques have been proposed for modelling and recognising human activities, with a specific focus on the development of approaches to classifying human activities using deep learning techniques. The research presented in this paper proposes a fuzzy feature representation approach to represent occupancy sensor data, along with a Convolutional Neural Network Classifier (CNNC) for human activity modelling and recognition. Sensory data gathered from a home environment are converted into occupancy data representing human activities and then fuzzified before being fed as inputs into the CNNC. The learning capability of CNNC allows the model to learn the relationship between the fuzzified inputs and their corresponding output activities during training mode. The relations learned in the trained CNNC model are then used to identify human activity patterns and classify these when the testing dataset is applied. The proposed method is evaluated using a dataset representing activities of daily living for a single user gathered from a real-home environment.

Fault diagnosis of rotating machinery is vital to identify incipient failures and avoid unexpected downtime in industrial systems. This paper proposes a new rolling bearing fault diagnosis method by integrating the fine-to-coarse multiscale permutation entropy (F2CMPE), Laplacian score (LS) and support vector machine (SVM). A novel entropy measure, named F2CMPE, was proposed by calculating permutation entropy via multiple-scale fine-grained and coarse-grained signals based on the wavelet packet decomposition. The entropy measure estimates the complexity of time series from both low- and high-frequency components. Moreover, the F2CMPE mitigates the drawback of producing time series with sharply reduced data length via the coarse-grained procedure in the conventional composite multiscale permutation entropy (CMPE). The comparative performance of the F2CMPE and CMPE is investigated by analyzing the synthetic and experimental signals for entropy-based feature extraction. In the proposed bearing fault diagnosis method, the F2CMPE is first used to extract the entropy-based features from bearing vibration signals. Then, LS and SVM are used for selection of features and fault classification, respectively. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified for rolling bearing fault diagnosis using experimental vibration data sets, and the results have demonstrated the capability of the proposed method to recognize and identify the bearing fault patterns under different fault states and severity levels.

Human activity recognition and behavior monitoring in a home setting using wireless sensor networks (WSNs) provide a great potential for ambient assisted living (AAL) applications, ranging from health and wellbeing monitoring to resource consumption monitoring. However, due to the limitations of the sensor devices, challenges in wireless communication and the challenges in processing large amounts of sensor data in order to recognize complex human activities, WSN-based AAL systems are not effectively integrated in the home environment. Additionally, given the variety of sensor types and activities, selecting the most suitable set of sensors in the deployment is an important task. In order to investigate and propose solutions to such challenges, we introduce a WSN-based multimodal AAL system compatible for homes with multiple residents. Particularly, we focus on the details of the system architecture, including the challenges of sensor selection, deployment, networking and data collection and provide guidelines for the design and deployment of an effective AAL system. We also present the details of the field study we conducted, using the systems deployed in two different real home environments with multiple residents. With these systems, we are able to collect ambient sensor data from multiple homes. This data can be used to assess the wellbeing of the residents and identify deviations from everyday routines, which may be indicators of health problems. Finally, in order to elaborate on the possible applications of the proposed AAL system and to exemplify directions for processing the collected data, we provide the results of several human activity inference experiments, along with examples on how such results could be interpreted. We believe that the experiences shared in this work will contribute towards accelerating the acceptance of WSN-based AAL systems in the home setting.

Multiscale Permutation Entropy (MPE) analysis is a powerful ordinal tool in the measurement of information content of time series. MPE refinements, such as Composite MPE (cMPE) and Refined Composite MPE (rcMPE), greatly increase the precision of the entropy estimation by modifying the original method. Nonetheless, these techniques have only been proposed as algorithms, and are yet to be described from the theoretical perspective. Therefore, the purpose of this article is two-fold. First, we develop the statistical theory behind cMPE and rcMPE. Second, we propose an alternative method, Refined Composite Downsampling Permutation Entropy (rcDPE) to further increase the entropy estimation’s precision. Although cMPE and rcMPE outperform MPE when applied on uncorrelated noise, the results are higher than our predictions due to inherent redundancies found in the composite algorithms. The rcDPE method, on the other hand, not only conforms to our theoretical predictions, but also greatly improves over the other methods, showing the smallest bias and variance. By using MPE, rcMPE and rcDPE to classify faults in bearing vibration signals, rcDPE outperforms the multiscaling methods, enhancing the difference between faulty and non-faulty signals, provided we apply a proper anti-aliasing low-pass filter at each time scale.

A multi-resolution fusion approach for human activity recognition from video data in tiny edge devices

Quantifying the complexity of the EEG signal during prolonged wakefulness and during sleep is gaining interest as an additional mean to characterize the mechanisms associated with sleep and wakefulness regulation. Here, we characterized how EEG complexity, as indexed by Multiscale Permutation Entropy (MSPE), changed progressively in the evening prior to light off and during the transition from wakefulness to sleep. We further explored whether MSPE was able to discriminate between wakefulness and sleep around sleep onset and whether MSPE changes were correlated with spectral measures of the EEG related to sleep need during concomitant wakefulness (theta power-Ptheta: 4-8 Hz). To address these questions, we took advantage of large datasets of several hundred of ambulatory EEG recordings of individual of both sexes aged 25-101 years. Results show that MSPE significantly decreases before light off (i.e. before sleep time) and in the transition from wakefulness to sleep onset. Furthermore, MSPE allows for an excellent discrimination between pre-sleep wakefulness and early sleep. Finally, we show that MSPE is correlated with concomitant Ptheta. Yet, the direction of the latter correlation changed from before light-off to the transition to sleep. Given the association between EEG complexity and consciousness, MSPE may track efficiently putative changes in consciousness preceding sleep onset. An MSPE stands as a comprehensive measure that is not limited to a given frequency band and reflects a progressive change brain state associated with sleep and wakefulness regulation. It may be an effective mean to detect when the brain is in a state close to sleep onset.

A method based on compound multiscale permutation entropy, support vector machine, and particle swarm optimization for roller bearings fault diagnosis was presented in this study. Firstly, the roller bearings vibration signals under different conditions were decomposed into permutation entropy values by the multiscale permutation entropy and compound multiscale permutation entropy methods. The compound multiscale permutation entropy model combined the different graining sequence information under each scale factor. The average value of each scale factor was regarded as the final entropy value in the compound multiscale permutation entropy model. The compound multiscale permutation entropy model suppressed the shortcomings of poor stability caused by the length of the original signals in the multiscale permutation entropy model. Validity and accuracy are considered in the numerical experiments, and then compared with the computational efficiency of the multiscale permutation entropy method. Secondly, the entropy values of the multiscale permutation entropy/compound multiscale permutation entropy under different scales are regarded as the input of the particle swarm optimization–support vector machine models for fulfilling the fault identification, the classification accuracy is used to verify the effectiveness of the multiscale permutation entropy/compound multiscale permutation entropy with particle swarm optimization–support vector machine. Finally, the experimental results show that the classification accuracy of the compound multiscale permutation entropy model is higher than that of the multiscale permutation entropy.

Financial time series analysis using the relation between MPE and MWPE

To examine the dependency levels of older adults living in nursing homes and home environments in their daily life activities, and the relationship involving pain, sleep, depression, and mental status affecting these levels. The comparative-descriptive and cross-sectional study was conducted in Cinarcik district of Yalova province, Turkey, from February to May 2016, and comprised older adults living in a nursing home and those in home environments. Data was collected using face-to-face interviews, a questionnaire, Barthel Index, Visual Analogue Scale, Standardised Mini-Mental State Examination, Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index and the Geriatric Depression Scale. Data was analysed using SPSS 20. Of the 185 subjects, 100(54%) were living in nursing homes and 85(46%) in home environments. Overall, there were 101(54.6%) women and 84(45.4%) men, and 97(52.4%) were aged >75 years. There was a significant positive relationship between Barthel Index and Standardised Mini Mental State Examination scores (p<0.05) and a significant negative relationship between Barthel Index and Geriatric Depression Scale scores among those living in nursing homes. Among those living in home environments, there was a statistically significant negative relationship involving Barthel Index, Visual Analogue Scale, Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index and the Geriatric Depression Scale scores (p<0.05). Also there was a significant positive relationship between Barthel Index and Standardised Mini- Mental State Examination scores (p<0.05). The dependency levels in daily life activities were found to be associated with mental status and depression in older adults living in nursing homes, while it was associated with pain, mental status, sleep and depression in those living in home environments.

Smart support systems for the recognition of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) can help elderly people live independently for longer improving their standard of living. Many machine learning approaches have been proposed lately for Human Activity Recognition (HAR), including elaborated networks that contain convolutional, recurrent, and attentive layers. The ubiquity of wearable devices has provided an increasing amount of time-series data that can be used for such applications in an unobtrusive manner. But there are not many studies on the performance of the attention-based Transformer model in HAR, especially not for complex activities such as ADLs. This work implements and evaluates the novel self-attention Transformer model for the classification of ADLs and compares it to the already well-established approach of recurrent Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks. The proposed method is a two-level hierarchical model, in which atomic activities are initially recognized in the first step and their probability scores are extracted and utilized for the Transformer-based classification of seven more complex ADLs in the second step. The Transformer is used at the second step to classify seven ADLs. Our results show that the Transformer model reaches the same performance and even outperforms LSTM networks cleary in the subject-dependent configuration (73.36 % and 69.09 %), while relying only on attention-mechanism to depict global dependencies between input and output without the need to use any recurrence. The proposed model was tested using two different segment lengths, indicating its effectiveness in learning long-range dependencies of shorter actions in complex activities.

Human activity recognition is considered a challenging task in sensor-based monitoring systems. In ambient intelligent environments, such as smart homes, collecting data from ambient sensors is useful for recognizing activities of daily living, which can then be used to provide assistance to inhabitants. Activities of daily living are composed of complex multivariable time series data that has high dimensionality, is huge in size, and is updated constantly. Thus, developing methods for analyzing time series data to extract meaningful features and specific characteristics would help solve the problem of human activity recognition. Based on the noticeable success of deep learning in the field of time series classification, we developed a model called a deep one-dimensional convolutional neural network (Deep 1d-CNN) for recognizing activities of daily living in smart homes. Our model contains several one-dimensional convolution layers coupled with max-pooling technique to learn the internal representation of time series data and automatically generate very deep features for recognizing different activity types. For the performance evaluation, we tested our deep model on the new real-life dataset, ContextAct@A4H, and the results showed that our model achieved a high F1 score (0.90). We also extended our study to show the potential energy saving in smart homes through recognizing activities of daily living. We built a recommendation system based on the activities recognized by our deep model to detect the devices that are wasting energy, and recommend the user to execute energy optimization actions. The experiment indicated that recognizing activities of daily living can result in energy savings of around 50%.

A survey on wearable sensor modality centred human activity recognition in health care

The sensor-based recognition of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) in smart-home environments enables several important applications, including the continuous monitoring of fragile subjects in their homes for healthcare systems. The majority of the approaches in the literature assume that only one resident is living in the home. Multi-inhabitant ADLs recognition is significantly more challenging, and only a limited effort has been devoted to address this setting by the research community. One of the major open problems is called data association, which is correctly associating each environmental sensor event (e.g., the opening of a fridge door) with the inhabitant that actually triggered it. Moreover, existing multi-inhabitant approaches rely on supervised learning, assuming a high availability of labeled data. However, collecting a comprehensive training set of ADLs (especially in multiple-residents settings) is prohibitive. In this work, we propose MICAR: a novel multi-inhabitant ADLs recognition approach that combines semi-supervised learning and knowledge-based reasoning. Data association is performed by semantic reasoning, combining high-level context information (e.g., residents’ postures and semantic locations) with triggered sensor events. The personalized stream of sensor events is processed by an incremental classifier, that is initialized with a limited amount of labeled ADLs. A novel cache-based active learning strategy is adopted to continuously improve the classifier. Our results on a dataset where up to 4 subjects perform ADLs at the same time show that MICAR reliably recognizes individual and joint activities while triggering a significantly low number of active learning queries.

How the complexity or irregularity of heart rate variability (HRV) changes across different sleep stages and the importance of these features in sleep staging are not fully understood. This study aimed to investigate the complexity or irregularity of the RR interval time series in different sleep stages and explore their values in sleep staging. We performed approximate entropy (ApEn), sample entropy (SampEn), fuzzy entropy (FuzzyEn), distribution entropy (DistEn), conditional entropy (CE), and permutation entropy (PermEn) analyses on RR interval time series extracted from epochs that were constructed based on two methods: (1) 270-s epoch length and (2) 300-s epoch length. To test whether adding the entropy measures can improve the accuracy of sleep staging using linear HRV indices, XGBoost was used to examine the abilities to differentiate among: (i) 5 classes [Wake (W), non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM), which can be divide into 3 sub-stages: stage N1, stage N2, and stage N3, and rapid-eye-movement (REM)]; (ii) 4 classes [W, light sleep (combined N1 and N2), deep sleep (N3), and REM]; and (iii) 3 classes: (W, NREM, and REM). SampEn, FuzzyEn, and CE significantly increased from W to N3 and decreased in REM. DistEn increased from W to N1, decreased in N2, and further decreased in N3; it increased in REM. The average accuracy of the three tasks using linear and entropy features were 42.1%, 59.1%, and 60.8%, respectively, based on 270-s epoch length; all were significantly lower than the performance based on 300-s epoch length (i.e., 54.3%, 63.1%, and 67.5%, respectively). Adding entropy measures to the XGBoost model of linear parameters did not significantly improve the classification performance. However, entropy measures, especially PermEn, DistEn, and FuzzyEn, demonstrated greater importance than most of the linear parameters in the XGBoost model.300-s270-s.

Human Activity Recognition Using Ambient Sensor Data