Smart home environments have a significant potential to provide for long-term monitoring of users with special needs in order to promote the possibility to age at home. Such environments are typically equipped with a number of heterogeneous sensors that monitor both health and environmental parameters. This paper presents a framework called E-care@home, consisting of an IoT infrastructure, which provides information with an unambiguous, shared meaning across IoT devices, end-users, relatives, health and care professionals and organizations. We focus on integrating measurements gathered from heterogeneous sources by using ontologies in order to enable semantic interpretation of events and context awareness. Activities are deduced using an incremental answer set solver for stream reasoning. The paper demonstrates the proposed framework using an instantiation of a smart environment that is able to perform context recognition based on the activities and the events occurring in the home.

As research in smart homes and activity recognition is increasing, it is of ever increasing importance to have benchmarks systems and data upon which researchers can compare methods. While synthetic data can be useful for certain method developments, real data sets that are open and shared are equally as important. This paper presents the E-care@home system, its installation in a real home setting, and a series of data sets that were collected using the E-care@home system. Our first contribution, the E-care@home system, is a collection of software modules for data collection, labeling, and various reasoning tasks such as activity recognition, person counting, and configuration planning. It supports a heterogeneous set of sensors that can be extended easily and connects collected sensor data to higher-level Artificial Intelligence (AI) reasoning modules. Our second contribution is a series of open data sets which can be used to recognize activities of daily living. In addition to these data sets, we describe the technical infrastructure that we have developed to collect the data and the physical environment. Each data set is annotated with ground-truth information, making it relevant for researchers interested in benchmarking different algorithms for activity recognition.

Concerning frailty, the use of home-based technology able to continuously and transparently monitor the independent elder may represent a useful tool to support the traditional geriatric assessment in the identification of elderly people at risk of frailty, with the final aim of guiding the development of early preventive interventions. To this aim, the European MoveCare project develops an ICT platform to support the independent living of the elder at home. Here, we describe how home-based monitoring of frailty is addressed within MoveCare, specifically for the five Fried criteria. The platform leverages a net of heterogeneous sensors a service robot, and the use of gamification to achieve ecological monitoring of frailty through quantitative measurements transparently recorded during common daily-life activities. The indicators collected over time are fed to the reasoning entity of the platform to provide informal caregivers with relevant information on the elder's status.

Dynamics in Human-AI interaction should lead to more satisfying and engaging collaboration. Key open questions are how to design such interactions and the role personal goals and expectations play. We developed three AI partners of varying initiative (leader, follower, shifting) in a collaborative game called Geometry Friends. We conducted a within-subjects experiment with 60 participants to assess personal AI partner preference and performance satisfaction as well as perceived warmth and competence of AI partners. Results show that AI partners following human initiative are perceived as warmer and more collaborative. However, some participants preferred AI leaders for their independence and speed, despite being seen as less friendly. This suggests that assigning a leadership role to the AI partner may be suitable for time-sensitive scenarios. We identify design factors for developing collaborative AI agents with varying levels of initiative to create more effective human-AI teams that consider context and individual preference.

Smart Homes are currently one of the hottest topics in the area of Internet of Things or Augmented Living. In order to provide high-level intelligent solutions, algorithms for identifying which activities the inhabitants intend to perform are necessary. Sensor data plays here an essential role, for testing, for learning underlying rules, for classifying and connecting sensor patterns and to inhabitant activities, etc. However, only few and limited data sets are currently available. We present concepts and solutions for generating high-quality data using a flexible agent-based simulation tool. The basic idea is to integrate the simulation of a sensorised apartment with human behaviour modelling based on constraint-based planning that produces a sequence of daily activities. The overall set-up is shown to generate data that exhibits the same relevant properties as data from a comparable real-world apartment.