A Deep Learning Approach for Recognizing Activity of Daily Living (ADL) for Senior Care: Exploiting Interaction Dependency and Temporal Patterns

Ensuring the health and safety of senior citizens who live alone is a growing societal concern. The Activity of Daily Living (ADL) approach is a common means to monitor disease progression and the ability of these individuals to care for themselves. However, the prevailing sensor-based ADL monitoring systems primarily rely on wearable motion sensors, capture insufficient information for accurate ADL recognition, and do not provide a comprehensive understanding of ADLs at different granularities. Current healthcare IS and mobile analytics research focuses on studying the system, device, and provided services, and is in need of an end-to-end solution to comprehensively recognize ADLs based on mobile sensor data. This study adopts the design science paradigm and employs advanced deep learning algorithms to develop a novel hierarchical, multiphase ADL recognition framework to model ADLs at different granularities. We propose a novel 2D interaction kernel for convolutional neural networks to leverage interactions between human and object motion sensors. We rigorously evaluate each proposed module and the entire framework against state-of-the-art benchmarks (e.g., support vector machines, DeepConvLSTM, hidden Markov models, and topic-modeling-based ADLR) on two real-life motion sensor datasets that consist of ADLs at varying granularities: Opportunity and INTER. Results and a case study demonstrate that our framework can recognize ADLs at different levels more accurately. We discuss how stakeholders can further benefit from our proposed framework. Beyond demonstrating practical utility, we discuss contributions to the IS knowledge base for future design science-based cybersecurity, healthcare, and mobile analytics applications.