As people age, their health typically declines, resulting in difficulty in performing daily activities. Sleep-related problems are common issues with older adults, including shifts in circadian rhythms. A detection method is proposed to identify progressive changes in sleeping activity using a three-step process: partitioning, mining, and measuring. Specifically, the original spatiotemporal representation of each sleeping activity instance was first transformed into a sequence of equal-sized segments, or symbols, via a partitioning process. A data-mining-based algorithm was proposed to find symbols that are not present in all instances of a sleeping activity. Finally, a measuring process was responsible for evaluating the changes in these symbols. Experimental evaluation conducted on a group of datasets of older adults showed that the proposed method is able to identify progressive changes in sleeping activity.
Keywords: change identification; daily routine; older adults; progressive change; sleeping.