Introduction
The accurate measurement of behaviour is vitally important to many disciplines and practitioners of various kinds. While different methods have been used (such as observation, diaries, questionnaire), none are able to accurately monitor behaviour over the long term in the
natural context of people’s own lives. The aim of this work was therefore to develop and test
a reliable system for unobtrusively monitoring various behaviours of multiple individuals
within the same household over a period of several months.
Methods
A commercial Real Time Location System was adapted to meet these requirements and
subsequently validated in three households by monitoring various bathroom behaviours.
Results
The results indicate that the system is robust, can monitor behaviours over the long-term in
different households and can reliably distinguish between individuals. Precision rates were
high and consistent. Recall rates were less consistent across households and behaviours,
although recall rates improved considerably with practice at set-up of the system. The
achieved precision and recall rates were comparable to the rates observed in more controlled environments using more valid methods of ground truthing.
Conclusion
These initial findings indicate that the system is a valuable, flexible and robust system for
monitoring behaviour in its natural environment that would allow new research questions to
be addressed.