Assessing the impact of individual sensor reliability within smart living environments

The potential of smart living environments to provide a form of independent living for the ageing population is becoming more recognised. These environments are comprised of sensors which are used to assess the state of the environment, some form of information management to process the sensor data and finally a suite of actuators which can be used to change the state of the environment. When providing a form of support which may impinge upon the well being of the end user it is essential that a high degree of reliability can be maintained. Within this paper we present an information management framework to process sensor based data within smart environments. Based on this framework we assess the impact of sensor reliability on the classification of activities of daily living. From this assessment we show how it is possible to identify which sensors within a given set of experiments can be considered to be the most critical and as such consider how this information may be used for managing sensor reliability from a practical point of view.