Development of a Wearable-Sensor-Based Fall Detection System

Fall detection is a major challenge in the public healthcare domain, especially for the elderly as the decline of their physical fitness, and timely and reliable surveillance is necessary to mitigate the negative effects of falls. This paper develops a novel fall detection system based on a wearable device. The system monitors the movements of human body, recognizes a fall from normal daily activities by an effective quaternion algorithm, and automatically sends request for help to the caregivers with the patient’s location

Energy expenditure estimation using accelerometry and heart rate for multiple sclerosis and healthy older adults

Accurate estimation of Energy Expenditure (EE) in ambulatory settings provides greater insight into the underlying relation between different human physical activity and health. This paper describes the development and validation of energy expenditure estimation algorithms. A total of 4 healthy subjects and 3 suffering from multiple sclerosis were monitored using a gold-standard energy expenditure measurement system, a heart rate monitor and accelerometry. We demonstrated that greater improvements can be achieved by estimating energy expenditure during normal activities of daily living by combining both whole body acceleration estimates, vertical body acceleration estimates, body posture and heart rate data as part of a flex heart rate algorithm in subject specific models when compared to using accelerometry or heart rate data alone. This will allow more accurate EE estimation during normal activities of daily living

Classification Accuracy of the Wrist-Worn GENEA Accelerometer During Structured Activity Bouts: A Cross-Validation Study

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine whether the left wrist cutpoints of Esliger et al., for the triaxial GENEA accelerometer, are accurate for predicting intensity categories during 14 different activities including; treadmill-based, home and office, and sport activities. Methods: 130 adults wore a GENEA accelerometer on their left wrist while performing various lifestyle activities. The Oxycon Mobile Portable Metabolic Unit was used to measure oxygen uptake during each activity. Statistical analysis used Spearman’s rank correlations to determine the relationship between measured and estimated intensity classifications. Cross tabulation tables were constructed to describe under or over estimation of misclassified activities, and one-way chi-squares were used to test whether the accuracy rate of each activity differed from 80%. Results: For all activities the GENEA accelerometer-based physical activity monitor explained 41.1% of the energy expenditure. The GENEA correctly classified 52.8% of observations when all activities were combined. Five of the 14 activities showed no statistical difference in physical activity intensity classification estimation when compared to 80% accuracy, with 1 activity (treadmill jogging) showing statistically greater accuracy than 80%. For the remainder of the activities, the GENEA showed less than 80% accuracy for predicting intensity. Conclusion: Cross-validation of the proposed GENEA left wrist cutpoints classified the majority of activities performed significantly below the accuracy rate of 80%. Researchers should be cautious when applying the Esliger et al. cutpoints to a different population and activities not tested by those investigators

MEMS Accelerometers

Micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) devices are widely used for inertia, pressure, and ultrasound sensing applications. Research on integrated MEMS technology has undergone extensive development driven by the requirements of a compact footprint, low cost, and increased functionality. Accelerometers are among the most widely used sensors implemented in MEMS technology. MEMS accelerometers are showing a growing presence in almost all industries ranging from automotive to medical. A traditional MEMS accelerometer employs a proof mass suspended to springs, which displaces in response to an external acceleration. A single proof mass can be used for one- or multi-axis sensing. A variety of transduction mechanisms have been used to detect the displacement. They include capacitive, piezoelectric, thermal, tunneling, and optical mechanisms. Capacitive accelerometers are widely used due to their DC measurement interface, thermal stability, reliability, and low cost. However, they are sensitive to electromagnetic field interferences and have poor performance for high-end applications (e.g., precise attitude control for the satellite). Over the past three decades, steady progress has been made in the area of optical accelerometers for high-performance and high-sensitivity applications but several challenges are still to be tackled by researchers and engineers to fully realize opto-mechanical accelerometers, such as chip-scale integration, scaling, low bandwidth, etc

Robust Algorithms for Estimating Vehicle Movement from Motion Sensors Within Smartphones

Building sustainable traffic control solutions for urban streets (e.g., eco-friendly signal control) and highways requires effective and reliable sensing capabilities for monitoring traffic flow conditions so that both the temporal and spatial extents of congestion are observed. This would enable optimal control strategies to be implemented for maximizing efficiency and for minimizing the environmental impacts of traffic. Various types of traffic detection systems, such as inductive loops, radar, and cameras have been used for these purposes. However, these systems are limited, both in scope and in time. Using GPS as an alternative method is not always viable because of problems such as urban canyons, battery depletion, and precision errors. In this research, a novel approach has been taken, in which smartphone low energy sensors (such as the accelerometer) are exploited. The ubiquitous use of smartphones in everyday life, coupled with the fact that they can collect, store, compute, and transmit data, makes them a feasible and inexpensive alternative to the mainstream methods. Machine learning techniques have been used to develop models that are able to classify vehicle movement and to detect the stop and start points during a trip. Classifiers such as logistic regression, discriminant analysis, classification trees, support vector machines, neural networks, and Hidden Markov models have been tested. Hidden Markov models substantially outperformed all the other methods. The feature quality plays a key role in the success of a model. It was found that, the features which exploited the variance of the data were the most effective. In order to assist in quantifying the performance of the machine learning models, a performance metric called Change Point Detection Performance Metric (CPDPM) was developed. CPDPM proved to be very useful in model evaluation in which the goal was to find the change points in time series data with high accuracy and precision. The integration of accelerometer data, even in the motion direction, yielded an estimated speed with a steady slope, because of factors such as phone sensor bias, vibration, gravity, and other white noise. A calibration method was developed that makes use of the predicted stop and start points and the slope of integrated accelerometer data, which achieves great accuracy in estimating speed. The developed models can serve as the basis for many applications. One such field is fuel consumption and CO2 emission estimation, in which speed is the main input. Transportation mode detection can be improved by integrating speed information. By integrating Vehicle (Phone) to Infrastructure systems (V2I), the model outputs, such as the stop and start instances, average speed along a corridor, and queue length at an intersection, can provide useful information for traffic engineers, planners, and decision makers

Pavement Performance Evaluation Using Connected Vehicles

Roads deteriorate at different rates from weathering and use. Hence, transportation agencies must assess the ride quality of a facility regularly to determine its maintenance needs. Existing models to characterize ride quality produce the International Roughness Index (IRI), the prevailing summary of roughness. Nearly all state agencies use Inertial Profilers to produce the IRI. Such heavily instrumented vehicles require trained personnel for their operation and data interpretation. Resource constraints prevent the scaling of these existing methods beyond 4% of the network. This dissertation developed an alternative method to characterize ride quality that uses regular passenger vehicles. Smartphones or connected vehicles provide the onboard sensor data needed to enable the new technique. The new method provides a single index summary of ride quality for all paved and unpaved roads. The new index is directly proportional to the IRI. A new transform integrates sensor data streams from connected vehicles to produce a linear energy density representation of roughness. The ensemble average of indices from different speed ranges converges to a repeatable characterization of roughness. The currently used IRI is undefined at speeds other than 80 km/h. This constraint mischaracterizes roughness experienced at other speeds. The newly proposed transform integrates the average roughness indices from all speed ranges to produce a speed-independent characterization of ride quality. This property avoids spatial wavelength bias, which is a critical deficiency of the IRI. The new method leverages the emergence of connected vehicles to provide continuous characterizations of ride quality for the entire roadway network. This dissertation derived precision bounds of deterioration forecasting for models that could utilize the new index. The results demonstrated continuous performance improvements with additional vehicle participation. With practical traversal volumes, the achievable precision of forecast is within a few days. This work also quantified capabilities of the new transform to localize roadway anomalies that could pose travel hazards. The methods included derivations of the best sensor settings to achieve the desired performances. Several case studies validated the findings. These new techniques have the potential to save agencies millions of dollars annually by enabling predictive maintenance practices for all roadways, worldwide.Mountain Plains Consortium (MPC

One-Class Subject Identification From Smartphone-Acquired Walking Data

In this work, a novel type of human identification system is proposed, which has the aim to recognize a user from his biometric traits of his way of walk. A smartphone is utilized to acquire motion data from the built-in sensors. Data from accelerometer and gyroscope are processed through a cycle extraction phase, a Convolutional Neural Network for feature extraction and a One-Class SVM classifier for identification. From quantitave results the system achieves an Equal Error Rate close to 1

A machine learning framework for automatic human activity classification from wearable sensors

Wearable sensors are becoming increasingly common and they permit the capture of physiological data during exercise, recuperation and everyday activities. This work investigated and advanced the current state-of-the-art in machine learning technology for the automatic classification of captured physiological data from wearable sensors. The overall goal of the work presented here is to research and investigate every aspect of the technology and methods involved in this field and to create a framework of technology that can be utilised on low-cost platforms across a wide range of activities. Both rudimentary and advanced techniques were compared, including those that allowed for both real-time processing on an android platform and highly accurate postprocessing on a desktop computer. State-of-the-art feature extraction methods such as Fourier and Wavelet analysis were also researched to ascertain how well they could extract discriminative physiological information. Various classifiers were investigated in terms of their ability to work with different feature extraction methods. Consequently, complex classification fusion models were created to increase the overall accuracy of the activity recognition process. Genetic algorithms were also employed to optimise classifier parameter selection in the multidimensional search space. Large annotated sporting activity datasets were created for a range of sports that allowed different classification models to be compared. This allowed for a machine learning framework to be constructed that could potentially create accurate models when applied to any unknown dataset. This framework was also successfully applied to medical and everyday-activity datasets confirming that the approach could be deployed in different application settings