A Static Evidential Network for Context Reasoning in Home-Based Care

In home-based care, reliable contextual information of remotely monitored patients should be generated by correctly recognizing the activities to prevent hazardous situations of the patient. It is difficult to achieve a higher confidence level of contextual information for several reasons. First, low-level data from multisensors have different degrees of uncertainty. Second, generated contexts can be conflicting, even though they are acquired by simultaneous operations. We propose the static evidential fusion process (SEFP) as a context-reasoning method. The context-reasoning method processes sensor data with an evidential form based on the Dezert-Smarandache theory (DSmT). The DSmT approach reduces ambiguous or conflicting contextual information in multisensor networks. Moreover, we compare SEFP based on DSmT with traditional fusion processes such as Bayesian networks and the Dempster-Shafer theory to understand the uncertainty analysis in decision making and to show the improvement of the DSmT approach compared to the others.