Internet of Things Based Data Driven Storytelling for Supporting Social Connections

The empty nest syndrome has become a significant modern social problem. Recent research has enhanced physical health monitoring for the elderly in smart home environment. However, the social needs of the empty nesters have been less supported in smart home designs. A compelling story about the elderly can make the adult children emotionally attached to their elderly parents and establish a healthy social connection between them. In this work, we propose a data-driven story generation system based on the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT based techniques enable the real time collection of the elderly´s environment data through various sensors located in the home. The story generation system can weave the information mined from the sensor data into a story with high persuasive and emotion arousing power. Our system automatically collects raw sensor data on the cloud server and maps them to values of semantically meaningful context variables through activity functions. A director agent organizes the story plot with a Goal Net based approach and dynamically generates storylines based on a set of scene selection rules. The proposed system is carefully studied with a simulated smart home environment.