iKnow: Ontology-driven situational awareness for the recognition of activities of daily living

We present iKnow, an ontology-driven framework for semantic situation understanding in pervasive multi-sensor environments for human activity recognition. iKnow capitalises on the use of OWL ontological knowledge to capture domain relationships between low-level observations and high-level activities, while context aggregation and activity interpretation are supported through context-aware fusion. Rather than using ontologies as highly-structured, strict contextual models, our aim is to capture abstract dependencies among low- and high-level concepts, such as locations and objects involved in activities, towards addressing practical real-world challenges in the domain. The framework has been applied in the eminent field of healthcare, providing the models for the semantic enrichment and fusion of heterogeneous multisensory descriptors for monitoring the behaviour of people with Alzheimer's disease.