  With the tremendous progress in sensing and IoT infrastructure, it is
foreseeable that IoT systems will soon be available for commercial markets,
such as in people's homes. In this paper, we present a deployment study using
sensors attached to household objects to capture the resourcefulness of three
individuals. The concept of resourcefulness highlights the ability of humans to
repurpose objects spontaneously for a different use case than was initially
intended. It is a crucial element for human health and wellbeing, which is of
great interest for various aspects of HCI and design research. Traditionally,
resourcefulness is captured through ethnographic practice. Ethnography can only
provide sparse and often short duration observations of human experience, often
relying on participants being aware of and remembering behaviours or thoughts
they need to report on. Our hypothesis is that resourcefulness can also be
captured through continuously monitoring objects being used in everyday life.
We developed a system that can record object movement continuously and deployed
them in homes of three elderly people for over two weeks. We explored the use
of probabilistic topic models to analyze the collected data and identify common
patterns.
