Smart environments and activity recognition: a logic-based approach

This paper introduces a framework for enabling context-aware behaviors in smart environment applications, with a special emphasis on smart homes and similar scenarios. In particular, an ontology-based architecture is described that allows system designers to specify non trivial situations the system must be able to detect on the basis of available sensory data. Relevant situations may include activities and events that could be prolonged over long periods of time. Therefore, the ontology encodes temporal operators that, once applied to sensory information, allow to efficiently recognize and correlate different human activities and other events whose temporal relationships are contextually important. Special emphasis is devoted to actual representation and recognition of temporally distributed situations. The proof of concept is validated through a thoroughly described example of system usage.