Multi-modal sensing for human activity recognition

Robots for the elderly are a particular category of home assistive robots, helping people in the execution of daily life tasks to extend their independent life. Such robots should be able to determine the level of independence of the user and track its evolution over time, to adapt the assistance to the person capabilities and needs. Human Activity Recognition systems employ various sensing strategies, relying on environmental or wearable sensors, to recognize the daily life activities which provide insights on the health status of a person. The main contribution of the article is the design of an heterogeneous information management framework, allowing for the description of a wide variety of human activities in terms of multi-modal environmental and wearable sensing data and providing accurate knowledge about the user activity to any assistive robot.