Human-behaviour study with situation lattices

Most research in the area of smart environments focuses on improving the accuracy with which human activities can be recognised. Relatively little research has been done into how designers can gain insights into the behaviours their systems are observing, and feed these insights back into improving systems design. We describe a mathematical structure, the situation lattice, and show how it can be used to discover knowledge about activities and the way in which they can be sensed. We show how this knowledge can be used to improve activity recognition, using the example of a real-world smart home data set.