Table 1 Sensors in the smart home: summary of main characteristics relevant to activity detection [40]
From: Monitoring of the daily living activities in smart home care
Sensor | Measurement | Data format | Advantage | Disadvantage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Video cameras | Human actions/environmental state | Image, video | Precise information | Privacy issues, computational expense, acceptability issues |
Microphones | Voice detection, other sounds | Audio | Certain and rich information about sound | Implementation difficulty and high computation cost, potential acceptability issues |
Simple binary sensors | User–object interaction detection movements and location identification | Categorical | Low-cost, low maintenance, easy to install and replace, inexpensive, less privacy-sensitivity, minimal computation requirements | Provide simple and limited information for composite and multi-user activity monitoring |
RFID | Object and user identification | Categorical | Small size and low cost | Reader collision and tag collision, range limited |
Temperature sensor, light sensor, humidity sensor | Environmental parameters | Time series | Intuitive monitoring of environment and objects | Limited information for activity monitoring |
Wearable inertial sensors | Acceleration orientation | Time series | Compact size, low cost, non-intrusiveness, high accuracy, unique identification of users, user’s location easily tracked. | Cumbersome and uncomfortable feeling, cannot provide sufficient context information |
Wearable vital signs sensors | Vital signs | Analog signal | Sensitive to slight change in vital signs monitoring more accurate in emergency situation detecting | Reliability constraints, security issues and uncomfortable feeling for long-time skin attaching |