Flávia Dias Casagrande successfully completed her PhD trial lecture and thesis defense at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo on Friday, the 13th of December 2019 and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
The title of her thesis is “Sensor Event and Activity Prediction using Binary Sensors in Real Homes with Older Adults” and the given topic for her trial lecture was “Ambient Intelligence for Sensor Network”.
A fair amount of research on smart home functions has aimed at assisting older adults in their everyday life. The implementation of these functions relies on the performance of activity recognition and prediction algorithms. The research literature contains a number of well-performing algorithms for activity recognition and prediction. However, most of this work uses data collected in controlled environments (e.g. lab environments) using scripted activities.
This thesis applied, evaluated, and compared the performance of state-of-the-art prediction algorithms in real-world scenarios. The project conducted a field trial including eight smart homes with one resident each, located in a care facility in Oslo for older adults over 65 years old. The homes have about 15 sensors, including motion, magnetic, and power sensors. Probabilistic methods and neural networks were applied to predict the next sensor event and activity of daily living in the home, as well as its time of occurrence.
The work shows that it is possible to achieve acceptable prediction accuracy with few sensors and about three weeks of collected data. Transfer learning between apartments has also shown to be well performing. In addition, the study can be useful for deciding which prediction methods to use depending on the case, and in accordance with project constraints (e.g. the number of sensors, user privacy).
The following committee has been appointed to evaluate her thesis, trial lecture and defense:
- First external opponent: Professor Ahmad Lotfi, School of Science & Technology, Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom.
- Second external opponent: Professor Svetlana Yanushkevich, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Calgary, Canada.
- Internal member: Professor Carsten Griwodz, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway.
- Chair of defence: Lecturer Dag Langmyhr, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo.
Flávia Dias Casagrande carried out her PhD work at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo.
Her main supervisor was Associate Professor Evi Zouganeli, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway and co-supervisor Professor Jim Tørresen, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway.
Congratulations!
