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Chapter 2
INTRODUCTION
Intelligent Environments (IEs) are “…digital
environments that proactively, but sensibly, assist
people in their daily lives” (Augusto et al. 2007).
They offer an opportunity to blend a diversity
of disciplines, from the more technical to those
more human oriented, which at this point in his-
tory can be combined to help people in different
environments, at home, in a car, in the classroom,
shopping centre, etc.
One of the hidden and most important assump-
tions in IEs is that they are pioneering a transition
from techno-centered systems to human-centered
Asier Aztiria
University of Mondragon, Spain
Juan Carlos Augusto
University of Ulster, UK
Context-Aware Discovery
of Human Frequent
Behaviours through Sensor
Information Interpretation
ABSTRACT
The ability of discovering frequent behaviours of the users allows an environment to act intelligently,
for example automating some devices’ activation. Moreover, such frequent behaviours could be used
to understand and detect bad or unhealthy habits. Such a discovering process must be as unobtrusive
and transparent as possible. In that sense, the ability of inferring interesting information from sensors
installed in the environment plays an essential role in order to provide the discovering process with
meaningful data. The importance of this system is clear due to the fact the process of discovering frequent
behaviours will totally depend upon the actions/activities identifed by such a system. This development
reinforces the link between context-awareness and human behaviour understanding as it can perceive a
current situation, compare it to typical behaviour, and diferentiate between the two.
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-3682-8.ch002