A Visual Analytics Approach for Detecting and Understanding Anomalous Resident Behaviors in Smart Healthcare

With the development of science and technology, it is possible to analyze residents’ daily behaviors for the purpose of smart healthcare in the smart home environment. Many researchers have begun to detect residents’ anomalous behaviors and assess their physical condition, but these approaches used by the researchers are often caught in plight caused by a lack of ground truth, one-sided analysis of behavior, and difficulty of understanding behaviors. In this paper, we put forward a smart home visual analysis system (SHVis) to help analysts detect and comprehend unusual behaviors of residents, and predict the health information intelligently. Firstly, the system classifies daily activities recorded by sensor devices in smart home environment into different categories, and discovers unusual behavior patterns of residents living in this environment by using various characteristics extracted from those activities and appropriate unsupervised anomaly detection algorithm. Secondly, on the basis of figuring out the residents’ anomaly degree of every date, we explore the daily behavior patterns and details with the help of several visualization views, and compare and analyze residents’ activities of various dates to find the reasons why residents act unusually. In the case study of this paper, we analyze residents’ behaviors that happened over two months and find unusual indoor behaviors and give health advice to the residents.