A new illness recognition framework using frequent temporal pattern mining

Living alone in their own residence, older adults are at-risk for late assessment of physical or cognitive changes due to many factors such as their impression that such changes are simply a normal part of aging or their reluctance to admit to a problem. Sensors networks have emerged in the last decade as a possible solution to older adult health monitoring and early illness recognition. Typical early illness recognition approaches are either concentrated on the detection of a given set of activities such as a fall or walks, or on the detection of anomalies such as too many bathroom visits. In this paper we propose a new illness recognition framework, MFA, based on detecting a missing frequent activity from the daily routine. MFA is implemented using a frequent temporal pattern detection algorithm and demonstrated on a pilot dataset collected in TigerPlace, an aging in place community from Columbia, Missouri.