Activity-Aware Sensor Cycling for Human Activity Monitoring in Smart Homes

Abstract

Smart homes are one of the Internet of Things domains intended to support and aid the residents through various smart services. These services require accurate context inferences using daily activity patterns and environmental properties. To satisfy such a need with battery-powered sensors, various duty cycling schemes were introduced. In this letter, we propose an activity-aware sensor cycling approach that makes the best tradeoff for duty cycle adjustments by exploiting the predictable behavior of residents, thereby significantly improving the activity detection accuracy at a marginal increase of the energy consumption. Evaluation results demonstrate that it achieves up to 99% accuracy of activity detection and extends the network lifetime by supporting balanced energy consumption among sensors.