This paper addresses the growing need for monitoring daily activities of elderly individuals through smart home technology, utilizing classifiers like cost-sensitive support vector machines (c-SVM) to improve activity recognition despite class imbalance in datasets. The authors propose a new criterion for selecting cost parameters for c-SVM, demonstrating through experiments that it outperforms traditional methods in recognizing activities from sensor data. The proposed approach is significant for enhancing caregiving for the elderly by accurately inferring their activities at home.