Two-stage RFID approach for localizing objects in smart homes based on gradient boosted decision trees with under- and over-sampling

Developing automated systems with a reasonable cost for long-term care for elders is a promising research direction. Such smart systems are based on realizing activities of daily living (ADLs) to enable aging in place while preserving the quality of life of all inhabitants in smart homes. One of the research directions is based on localizing items used by elders to monitor their activities with fine-grained details of the progress. In this paper, we shed the light on this issue by presenting an approach for localizing items in smart homes. The presented method is based on applying machine learning algorithms to Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags readings. Our approach achieves the required task through two stages. The first stage detects in which room the selected object is located. Then, the second one determines the exact position of the selected object inside the detected room. Additionally, we present an efficient approach based on gradient boosted decision trees for detecting the location of the selected object in a real-world smart home. Moreover, we employ some techniques of over- and under-sampling with data clustering for improving the performance of the presented techniques. Many experiments are conducted in this work to evaluate the performance of the presented approach for localizing objects in a real smart home. The results of the experiments have shown that our approach provides remarkable performance.