The development and validation of a Real Time Location System to reliably monitor everyday activities in natural contexts

Judah, G, de Witt Huberts, J, Drassal, A and Aunger, RORCID logo (2017). The development and validation of a Real Time Location System to reliably monitor everyday activities in natural contexts. [Dataset]. Figshare. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0171610
Copy

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. A commercial Real Time Location System was adapted to meet these requirements and subsequently validated in three households by monitoring various bathroom behaviours. 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. 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.

Keywords

Behavior, Sensory systems, Soaps, Vitamins, Microphones, Research validity, Hygiene, Research monitoring

S1_Dataset.xlsx
subject
Data
Creative Commons: Attribution
Available under Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0
info
Data household 1 (MS Excel). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0171610.s001
grid_on
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet
folder_info
56kB

Download
S1_Table.docx
subject
Data
Creative Commons: Attribution
Available under Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0
info
Recognition rates for each household (MS Word). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0171610.s004
description
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
folder_info
83kB

Download
S2_Dataset.xlsx
subject
Data
Creative Commons: Attribution
Available under Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0
info
Data household 2 (MS Excel). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0171610.s002
grid_on
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet
folder_info
30kB

Download
S3_Dataset.xlsx
subject
Data
Creative Commons: Attribution
Available under Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0
info
Data household 3 (MS Excel). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0171610.s003
grid_on
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet
folder_info
46kB

Download

Atom BibTeX OpenURL ContextObject in Span Multiline CSV OpenURL ContextObject Dublin Core (with Type as Type) MPEG-21 DIDL Data Cite XML EndNote HTML Citation JSON METS MODS RDF+N3 RDF+N-Triples RDF+XML Reference Manager Refer Simple Metadata ASCII Citation EP3 XML
Export

Downloads