MEAL-TAKING ACTIVITY MONITORING IN THE ELDERLY BASED ON SENSOR DATA: COMPARISON OF UNSUPERVISED CLASSIFICATION METHODS
Abstract
In an era marked by a demographic change towards an older population, there is an urgent need to improve nutritional
monitoring in view of the increase in frailty. This research aims to enhance the identification of meal-taking activities by
combining K-Means, GMM, and DBSCAN techniques. Using the Davies-Bouldin Index (DBI) for the optimal mealtaking activity clustering, the results show that K-Means seems to be the best solution, thanks to its unrivalled efficiency
in data demarcation, compared with the capabilities of GMM and DBSCAN. Although capable of identifying complex
patterns and outliers, the latter methods are limited by their operational complexities and dependence on precise
parameter configurations. In this paper, we have processed data from 4 houses equipped with sensors. The findings
indicate that applying the K-Means method results in high performance, evidenced by a particularly low Davies-Bouldin
Index (DBI), illustrating optimal cluster separation and cohesion. Calculating the average duration of each activity using
the GMM algorithm allows distinguishing various categories of meal-taking activities. Alternatively, this can correspond
to different times of the day fitting to each meal-taking activity. Using K-Means, GMM, and DBSCAN clustering
algorithms, the study demonstrates an effective strategy for thoroughly understanding the data. This approach facilitates
the comparison and selection of the most suitable method for optimal meal-taking activity clustering.
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