Grey-box Bayesian Optimization for Sensor Placement in Assisted Living Environments

Abstract

Optimizing the configuration and placement of sensors is crucial for reliable fall detection, indoor localization, and activity recognition in assisted living spaces. We propose a novel, sample-efficient approach to find a high-quality sensor placement in an arbitrary indoor space based on grey-box Bayesian optimization and simulation-based evaluation. Our key technical contribution lies in capturing domain-specific knowledge about the spatial distribution of activities and incorporating it into the iterative selection of query points in Bayesian optimization. Considering two simulated indoor environments and a real-world dataset containing human activities and sensor triggers, we show that our proposed method performs better compared to state-of-the-art black-box optimization techniques in identifying high-quality sensor placements, leading to accurate activity recognition in terms of F1-score, while also requiring a significantly lower (51.3% on average) number of expensive function queries.