Use of Clustering Algorithms for Sensor Placement and Activity Recognition in Smart Homes

This work presents a novel method for motion sensor placement within smart homes. Using recordings from 3D depth cameras within six real homes, clusters are created with the resident’s tracked location. The resulting clusters identify the possible position of a sensor and its field of view. By using a sequence of clusters as input to a Recurrent Neural Network, we evaluate our method on the task of activity recognition and prediction. These results are compared to using sensor events as input sequence, from motion sensors that were installed empirically in the same homes. Different clustering methods are investigated and all outperform the installed motion sensors, achieving a significant increase of prediction accuracy and F1-score.