An entropy-based approach to the study of human mobility and behavior in private homes

Understanding human mobility in outdoor environments is critical for many applications including traffic modeling, urban planning, and epidemic modeling. Using data collected from mobile devices, researchers have studied human mobility in outdoor environments and found that human mobility is highly regular and predictable. In this study, we focus on human mobility in private homes. Understanding this type of human mobility is essential as smart-homes and their assistive applications become ubiquitous. We model the movement of a resident using ambient motion sensor data and construct a chronological symbol sequence that represents the resident’s movement trajectory. Entropy rate is used to quantify the regularity of the resident’s mobility patterns, and an upper bound of predictability is estimated. However, the presence of visitors and malfunctioning sensors result in data that is not representative of the resident’s mobility patterns. We apply a change-point detection algorithm based on penalized contrast function to detect these changes, and to identify the time periods when the data do not completely reflect the resident’s activities. Experimental results using the data collected from 10 private homes over periods of 178 to 713 days show that human mobility at home is also highly predictable in the range of 70% independent of variations in floor plans and individual daily routines.