Inferring Availability for Communication in Smart Homes Using Context

This paper presents a technique for inferring the availability of people to receive communications based on their current situation. This technique uses a context model that associates situations with learned preferences for communications. Situations are represented as a tuple composed of identity, time, place, activity, correspondent, and communication modality. A place-based activity recognition technique is used to recognize the current activity from sensor data. Availability for communications is learned from history of the occupant’s preferences of availability for each situation. The system is demonstrated using a dataset of availability preferences recorded from the occupant of an instrumented apartment over a period of 4 weeks. Performance of the system is compared under various assumptions of independence of availability from some of the context elements. The paper is completed with a discussion of how such techniques can be used to construct an intelligent communications assistant for smart home services.