For the last years, time-series mining has become a challenging issue for researchers. An important application lies in most monitoring purposes, which require analyzing large sets of time-series for learning usual patterns. Any deviation from this learned profile is then considered as an unexpected situation. Moreover, complex applications may involve the temporal study of several heterogeneous parameters. In that paper, we propose a method for mining heterogeneous multivariate time-series for learning meaningful patterns. The proposed approach allows for mixed time-series -- containing both pattern and non-pattern data -- such as for imprecise matches, outliers, stretching and global translating of patterns instances in time. We present the early results of our approach in the context of monitoring the health status of a person at home. The purpose is to build a behavioral profile of a person by analyzing the time variations of several quantitative or qualitative parameters recorded through a provision of sensors installed in the home.
@cite_9: This article reviews the emerging concept of health "Smart" homes (HSH) and its potential through the use of telemedical information systems and communication technologies. HSH systems provide health care services for people with special needs who wish to remain independent and living in their own home. The large diversity of needs in a home-based patient population requires complex technology. Meeting these needs technically requires the use of a distributed approach and the combination of many hardware and software techniques. We also describe the wide scope of new information, communication, and data-acquisition technologies used in home health care. We offer an introduction to the HSH concept in terms of technical, economic, and human requirements. Examples of HSH projects are presented, including a short description of our own smart home and telehealthcare information system project.
Most of the current works dealing with home health telecare are focused either on implementing a generic architecture for the integrated medical information system, on improving the daily life of patients using various automatic devices, specific equipment, and basic alarms, or on providing health care services to patients suffering from specific diseases like asthma, diabetes, cardiac, pulmonary, or Alzheimers. Rialle have presented in @cite_9 an overview of projects related to home health telecare. Basic alarms are raised by smart sensors or low layers of a local intelligence unit when a problem occurs at a short temporal scale: either one parameter overpasses a critical value (nocturia, pollakisuria, fall, hypertensive crisis, etc.), or a critical scenario involving the value of possibly more than one parameter is recognized (asthma crisis, etc.). Our focus is on the broadcasting of high level alarms about the persons health status, which concern a larger temporal scale. That issue is solved by first learning the daily living habits of a person to be able to detect later unusual situations. That behavioral profile is built by mining heterogeneous multivariate temporal data collected from sensors installed at home for learning meaningful patterns.