Using Federated Learning to Achieve Proactive Context-Aware IoT Environments

The Internet of Things (IoT) is more present in our daily lives than ever before, turning everyday physical objects into smart devices. However, these devices often need excessive human interaction before reaching their best performance, making them time-consuming and reducing their usability. Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are being used to process data and to find ways to automate different behaviours. However, achieving learning models capable of handling any situation is a challenging task, worsened by time training restrictions. This paper proposes a Federated Learning solution to manage different IoT environments and provide accurate predictions, based on the user’s preferences. To improve the coexistence between devices and users, this approach makes use of other users’ previous behaviours in similar environments, and proposes predictions for newcomers to the federation. Also, for existing participants, it provides a closer personalization, immediate availability and prevents most manual interactions. The approach has been tested with synthetic and real data and identifies the actions to be performed with 94% accuracy on regular users.