An ontology-based approach to human telepresence

Detecting human presence automatically is a challenging task since several environmental parameters may affect the quality and the continuity of detection. Although many techniques have been developed so far in the literature to solve this problem, they generally rely on well-defined operational context. Hence, they are sensitive to uncontrolled variables and unpredicted events. In this work an ontology-based approach to human telepresence detection is presented. Contrarily to classic sensor-driven techniques, a top-down methodology is applied. Starting from a formal description of the problem ontology, a set of high-response rate and low-response rate sensors is employed in a computational model. As a consequence of this model, a multi-sensor equipped device has been experimentally setup to conduct measurements on real scenarios. Experiments have been devised to estimate the robustness of the detection. In particular, some preliminary evaluations related to using a minimal set of chemical sensors are reported.