Human Behavior Analysis by Means of Multimodal Context Mining

Sensors (Basel). 2016 Aug 10;16(8):1264. doi: 10.3390/s16081264.

Abstract

There is sufficient evidence proving the impact that negative lifestyle choices have on people's health and wellness. Changing unhealthy behaviours requires raising people's self-awareness and also providing healthcare experts with a thorough and continuous description of the user's conduct. Several monitoring techniques have been proposed in the past to track users' behaviour; however, these approaches are either subjective and prone to misreporting, such as questionnaires, or only focus on a specific component of context, such as activity counters. This work presents an innovative multimodal context mining framework to inspect and infer human behaviour in a more holistic fashion. The proposed approach extends beyond the state-of-the-art, since it not only explores a sole type of context, but also combines diverse levels of context in an integral manner. Namely, low-level contexts, including activities, emotions and locations, are identified from heterogeneous sensory data through machine learning techniques. Low-level contexts are combined using ontological mechanisms to derive a more abstract representation of the user's context, here referred to as high-level context. An initial implementation of the proposed framework supporting real-time context identification is also presented. The developed system is evaluated for various realistic scenarios making use of a novel multimodal context open dataset and data on-the-go, demonstrating prominent context-aware capabilities at both low and high levels.

Keywords: activity recognition; context awareness; emotion identification; human behaviour; location tracking; machine learning; ontologies.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Awareness / physiology
  • Choice Behavior / physiology*
  • Data Mining / methods*
  • Humans
  • Life Style*
  • Monitoring, Physiologic / methods*