Collecting human habit datasets for smart spaces through gamification and crowdsourcing

A lot of research in the last years has focused on smart spaces, covering aspects related to ambient intelligence, activity monitoring and mining, etc. All these efforts require datasets to be used for experimental purposes and as benchmarks for novel techniques. Such datasets are today difficult to obtain as, on the one hand, building smart facilities is expensive, requiring considerable costs for maintenance and extension, and, on the other hand, freely available datasets are scarce, not continuously updated and contain a limited set of sensors, thus not allowing the evaluation of algorithms that require the availability of specific categories of sensors. To this aim, we have built a prototype smart virtual environment producing sensor logs on the basis of activities performed by users as if they were really acting in a physical smart space.