A versatile annotated dataset for multimodal locomotion analytics with mobile devices

We explain how to obtain a highly versatile and precisely annotated dataset for the multimodal locomotion of mobile users. After presenting the experimental setup, data management challenges and potential applications, we conclude with the best practices for assuring data quality and reducing loss. The dataset currently comprises 7 months of measurements, collected by smartphone’s sensors and a body-worn camera, while the 3 participants used 8 different modes of transportation. It comprises 950 GB of sensor data, which corresponds to 750 hours of labelled data. The obtained data will be useful for a wide range of research questions related to activity recognition, and will be made available to the community

The University of Sussex-Huawei locomotion and transportation dataset for multimodal analytics with mobile devices

Scientific advances build on reproducible research which need publicly available benchmark datasets. The computer vision and speech recognition communities have led the way in establishing benchmark datasets. There are much less datasets available in mobile computing, especially for rich locomotion and transportation analytics. This paper presents a highly versatile and precisely annotated large-scale dataset of smartphone sensor data for multimodal locomotion and transportation analytics of mobile users. The dataset comprises 7 months of measurements, collected from all sensors of 4 smartphones carried at typical body locations, including the images of a body-worn camera, while 3 participants used 8 different modes of transportation in the southeast of the United Kingdom, including in London. In total 28 context labels were annotated, including transportation mode, participant’s posture, inside/outside location, road conditions, traffic conditions, presence in tunnels, social interactions, and having meals. The total amount of collected data exceed 950 GB of sensor data, which corresponds to 2812 hours of labelled data and 17562 km of traveled distance. We present how we set up the data collection, including the equipment used and the experimental protocol. We discuss the dataset, including the data curation process, the analysis of the annotations and of the sensor data. We discuss the challenges encountered and present the lessons learned and some of the best practices we developed to ensure high quality data collection and annotation. We discuss the potential applications which can be developed using this large-scale dataset. In particular, we present how a machine-learning system can use this dataset to automatically recognize modes of transportations. Many other research questions related to transportation analytics, activity recognition, radio signal propagation and mobility modelling can be adressed through this dataset. The full dataset is being made available to the community, and a thorough preview is already publishe

Multimodal Sensing for Robust and Energy-Efficient Context Detection with Smart Mobile Devices

Adoption of smart mobile devices (smartphones, wearables, etc.) is rapidly growing. There are already over 2 billion smartphone users worldwide [1] and the percentage of smartphone users is expected to be over 50% in the next five years [2]. These devices feature rich sensing capabilities which allow inferences about mobile device user’s surroundings and behavior. Multiple and diverse sensors common on such mobile devices facilitate observing the environment from different perspectives, which helps to increase robustness of inferences and enables more complex context detection tasks. Though a larger number of sensing modalities can be beneficial for more accurate and wider mobile context detection, integrating these sensor streams is non-trivial. This thesis presents how multimodal sensor data can be integrated to facilitate ro- bust and energy efficient mobile context detection, considering three important and challenging detection tasks: indoor localization, indoor-outdoor detection and human activity recognition. This thesis presents three methods for multimodal sensor inte- gration, each applied for a different type of context detection task considered in this thesis. These are gradually decreasing in design complexity, starting with a solution based on an engineering approach decomposing context detection to simpler tasks and integrating these with a particle filter for indoor localization. This is followed by man- ual extraction of features from different sensors and using an adaptive machine learn- ing technique called semi-supervised learning for indoor-outdoor detection. Finally, a method using deep neural networks capable of extracting non-intuitive features di- rectly from raw sensor data is used for human activity recognition; this method also provides higher degree of generalization to other context detection tasks. Energy efficiency is an important consideration in general for battery powered mo- bile devices and context detection is no exception. In the various context detection tasks and solutions presented in this thesis, particular attention is paid to this issue by relying largely on sensors that consume low energy and on lightweight computations. Overall, the solutions presented improve on the state of the art in terms of accuracy and robustness while keeping the energy consumption low, making them practical for use on mobile devices

The Real-Time Classification of Competency Swimming Activity Through Machine Learning

Every year, an average of 3,536 people die from drowning in America. The significant factors that cause unintentional drowning are people’s lack of water safety awareness and swimming proficiency. Current industry and research trends regarding swimming activity recognition and commercial motion sensors focus more on lap swimming utilized by expert swimmers and do not account for freeform activities. Enhancing swimming education through wearable technology can aid people in learning efficient and effective swimming techniques and water safety. We developed a novel wearable system capable of storing and processing sensor data to categorize competitive and survival swimming activities on a mobile device in real-time. This paper discusses the sensor placement, the hardware and app design, and the research process utilized to achieve activity recognition. For our studies, the data we have gathered comes from various swimming skill levels, from beginner to elite swimmers. Our wearable system uses angle-based novel features as inputs into optimal machine learning algorithms to classify flip turns, traditional competitive strokes, and survival swimming strokes. The machine-learning algorithm was able to classify all activities at .935 of an F-measure. Finally, we examined deep learning and created a CNN model to classify competitive and survival swimming strokes at 95% ac- curacy in real-time on a mobile device

Movement recognition from wearable sensors data: power-aware evolutionary training for template matching and data annotation recovery methods

Human activities recognition finds numerous applications for example in sport training, patient rehabilitation, gait analysis and surgical skills evaluation. Wearable sensing and Template Matching Methods (TMMs) offer significant advantages compared to manual assessment methods as well as to more cumbersome camera-based setups and other machine learning (ML) algorithms. TMMs require less data for training than other ML methods, they are low-power and therefore suitable for integration on wearable sensor. They compute a sample-by-sample distance between two time series. When applied to gestures sensors data, this even enables a richer and more movement-specific assessment and feedback. However, TMMs lack of a standard training procedure. In this thesis, we introduce an innovative evolutionary training algorithm for TMMthat not only can maximize recognition performance, but it can also prefer power-minimisation by reducing the TMM’s computational cost with a configurable trade-off. We exhibit that a reduction is even possible without sacrificing recognition performance by exploiting the long-established concept of “time warping”. We demonstrate that our method is suitable for a wide variety of raw data as well as processed, fused and encoded sensor data. We present a new original multi-modal, multi-user dataset of beach volleyball movements that allowed to evaluate our training methods on a real-case of sport training actions. Moreover, the collection of this dataset helped to generate a set of guidelines for the collection of movement data in the wild, using wearable sensors. We introduce a 3D human model that can be animated through inertial wearable sensors data for troubleshooting, movement analysis and privacy-safe annotation of human activities. Finally, through a case study on a dataset of drinking actions, we demonstrate how TMM can improve the quality of a badly annotated but highly valuable dataset

High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1406 “High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications (cHiPSet)“ project. Long considered important pillars of the scientific method, Modelling and Simulation have evolved from traditional discrete numerical methods to complex data-intensive continuous analytical optimisations. Resolution, scale, and accuracy have become essential to predict and analyse natural and complex systems in science and engineering. When their level of abstraction raises to have a better discernment of the domain at hand, their representation gets increasingly demanding for computational and data resources. On the other hand, High Performance Computing typically entails the effective use of parallel and distributed processing units coupled with efficient storage, communication and visualisation systems to underpin complex data-intensive applications in distinct scientific and technical domains. It is then arguably required to have a seamless interaction of High Performance Computing with Modelling and Simulation in order to store, compute, analyse, and visualise large data sets in science and engineering. Funded by the European Commission, cHiPSet has provided a dynamic trans-European forum for their members and distinguished guests to openly discuss novel perspectives and topics of interests for these two communities. This cHiPSet compendium presents a set of selected case studies related to healthcare, biological data, computational advertising, multimedia, finance, bioinformatics, and telecommunications

High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1406 “High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications (cHiPSet)“ project. Long considered important pillars of the scientific method, Modelling and Simulation have evolved from traditional discrete numerical methods to complex data-intensive continuous analytical optimisations. Resolution, scale, and accuracy have become essential to predict and analyse natural and complex systems in science and engineering. When their level of abstraction raises to have a better discernment of the domain at hand, their representation gets increasingly demanding for computational and data resources. On the other hand, High Performance Computing typically entails the effective use of parallel and distributed processing units coupled with efficient storage, communication and visualisation systems to underpin complex data-intensive applications in distinct scientific and technical domains. It is then arguably required to have a seamless interaction of High Performance Computing with Modelling and Simulation in order to store, compute, analyse, and visualise large data sets in science and engineering. Funded by the European Commission, cHiPSet has provided a dynamic trans-European forum for their members and distinguished guests to openly discuss novel perspectives and topics of interests for these two communities. This cHiPSet compendium presents a set of selected case studies related to healthcare, biological data, computational advertising, multimedia, finance, bioinformatics, and telecommunications

State of the art of audio- and video based solutions for AAL

Working Group 3. Audio- and Video-based AAL ApplicationsIt is a matter of fact that Europe is facing more and more crucial challenges regarding health and social care due to the demographic change and the current economic context. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has stressed this situation even further, thus highlighting the need for taking action. Active and Assisted Living (AAL) technologies come as a viable approach to help facing these challenges, thanks to the high potential they have in enabling remote care and support. Broadly speaking, AAL can be referred to as the use of innovative and advanced Information and Communication Technologies to create supportive, inclusive and empowering applications and environments that enable older, impaired or frail people to live independently and stay active longer in society. AAL capitalizes on the growing pervasiveness and effectiveness of sensing and computing facilities to supply the persons in need with smart assistance, by responding to their necessities of autonomy, independence, comfort, security and safety. The application scenarios addressed by AAL are complex, due to the inherent heterogeneity of the end-user population, their living arrangements, and their physical conditions or impairment. Despite aiming at diverse goals, AAL systems should share some common characteristics. They are designed to provide support in daily life in an invisible, unobtrusive and user-friendly manner. Moreover, they are conceived to be intelligent, to be able to learn and adapt to the requirements and requests of the assisted people, and to synchronise with their specific needs. Nevertheless, to ensure the uptake of AAL in society, potential users must be willing to use AAL applications and to integrate them in their daily environments and lives. In this respect, video- and audio-based AAL applications have several advantages, in terms of unobtrusiveness and information richness. Indeed, cameras and microphones are far less obtrusive with respect to the hindrance other wearable sensors may cause to one’s activities. In addition, a single camera placed in a room can record most of the activities performed in the room, thus replacing many other non-visual sensors. Currently, video-based applications are effective in recognising and monitoring the activities, the movements, and the overall conditions of the assisted individuals as well as to assess their vital parameters (e.g., heart rate, respiratory rate). Similarly, audio sensors have the potential to become one of the most important modalities for interaction with AAL systems, as they can have a large range of sensing, do not require physical presence at a particular location and are physically intangible. Moreover, relevant information about individuals’ activities and health status can derive from processing audio signals (e.g., speech recordings). Nevertheless, as the other side of the coin, cameras and microphones are often perceived as the most intrusive technologies from the viewpoint of the privacy of the monitored individuals. This is due to the richness of the information these technologies convey and the intimate setting where they may be deployed. Solutions able to ensure privacy preservation by context and by design, as well as to ensure high legal and ethical standards are in high demand. After the review of the current state of play and the discussion in GoodBrother, we may claim that the first solutions in this direction are starting to appear in the literature. A multidisciplinary 4 debate among experts and stakeholders is paving the way towards AAL ensuring ergonomics, usability, acceptance and privacy preservation. The DIANA, PAAL, and VisuAAL projects are examples of this fresh approach. This report provides the reader with a review of the most recent advances in audio- and video-based monitoring technologies for AAL. It has been drafted as a collective effort of WG3 to supply an introduction to AAL, its evolution over time and its main functional and technological underpinnings. In this respect, the report contributes to the field with the outline of a new generation of ethical-aware AAL technologies and a proposal for a novel comprehensive taxonomy of AAL systems and applications. Moreover, the report allows non-technical readers to gather an overview of the main components of an AAL system and how these function and interact with the end-users. The report illustrates the state of the art of the most successful AAL applications and functions based on audio and video data, namely (i) lifelogging and self-monitoring, (ii) remote monitoring of vital signs, (iii) emotional state recognition, (iv) food intake monitoring, activity and behaviour recognition, (v) activity and personal assistance, (vi) gesture recognition, (vii) fall detection and prevention, (viii) mobility assessment and frailty recognition, and (ix) cognitive and motor rehabilitation. For these application scenarios, the report illustrates the state of play in terms of scientific advances, available products and research project. The open challenges are also highlighted. The report ends with an overview of the challenges, the hindrances and the opportunities posed by the uptake in real world settings of AAL technologies. In this respect, the report illustrates the current procedural and technological approaches to cope with acceptability, usability and trust in the AAL technology, by surveying strategies and approaches to co-design, to privacy preservation in video and audio data, to transparency and explainability in data processing, and to data transmission and communication. User acceptance and ethical considerations are also debated. Finally, the potentials coming from the silver economy are overviewed.publishedVersio