Anomaly Detection in Smart Homes Using Deep Learning

Smart homes enable many people, especially the elderly and patients, to live alone and maintain their independence and comfort. The realization of this goal depends on monitoring all activities in the house to report any observed anomaly immediately to their relatives or nurses. Anomaly detection in smart homes, just by existing data, is not an easy task. In this work, we train a recurrent network with raw outputs of binary sensors, including motion and door sensors, to predict which sensor will be switched on/off in the next event, and how long this on/off mode will last. Then, using Beam Search, we extend this event into k sequences of consecutive events to determine the possible range of upcoming activities. The error of this prediction  i.e., the distance between these possible sequences and the real string of events is evaluated using several innovative methods for measuring the spatio-temporal similarity of the sequences. Modeling this error as a Gaussian distribution allows to assess the likelihood of anomaly scores. The input sequences that are ranked higher than a certain threshold will be considered as abnormal activities. The results of the experiments showed that this method enables the detection of abnormal activities with desirable accuracy.