Abstract

The automatic detection of anomalies in Active and Assisted Living (AAL) environments is important for monitoring the wellbeing and safety of the elderly at home. The integration of smart domotic sensors (e.g. presence detectors) with those ones equipping modern mobile robots (e.g. RGBD camera) provides new opportunities for addressing this challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to combine local activity levels detected by a single RGBD camera with the global activity perceived by a network of domotic sensors. Our approach relies on a new method for computing such a global activity using various presence detectors, based on the concept of entropy from information theory. This entropy effectively shows how active a particular room or environment’s area is. The solution includes also a new application of Hybrid Markov Logic Networks (HMLNs) to merge different information sources for local and global anomaly detection. The system has been tested with RGBD data and a comprehensive domotic dataset containing data entries from 37 different domotic sensors (presence, temperature, light, energy consumption, door contact), which is made publicly available. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach and the potential for complex anomaly detection in AAL settings.