Instructor Activity Recognition Using Smartwatch and Smartphone Sensors

During a classroom session, an instructor performs several activities, such as writing on the board, speaking to the students, gestures to explain a concept. A record of the time spent in each of these activities could be valuable information for the instructors to virtually observe their own style of instruction. It can help in identifying activities that engage the students more, thereby enhancing teaching effectiveness and efficiency. In this work, we present a preliminary study on profiling multiple activities of an instructor in the classroom using smartwatch and smartphone sensor data. We use 2 benchmark datasets to test out the feasibility of classifying the activities. Comparing multiple machine learning techniques, we finally propose a hybrid deep recurrent neural network based approach that performs better than the other techniques

Resource consumption analysis of online activity recognition on mobile phones and smartwatches

Most of the studies on human activity recognition using smartphones and smartwatches are performed in an offline manner. In such studies, collected data is analyzed in machine learning tools with less focus on the resource consumption of these devices for running an activity recognition system. In this paper, we analyze the resource consumption of human activity recognition on both smartphones and smartwatches, considering six different classifiers, three different sensors, different sampling rates and window sizes. We study the CPU, memory and battery usage with different parameters, where the smartphone is used to recognize seven physical activities and the smartwatch is used to recognize smoking activity. As a result of this analysis, we report that classification function takes a very small amount of CPU time out of total app’s CPU time while sensing and feature calculation consume most of it. When an additional sensor is used besides an accelerometer, such as gyroscope, CPU usage increases significantly. Analysis results also show that increasing the window size reduces the resource consumption more than reducing the sampling rate. As a final remark, we observe that a more complex model using only the accelerometer is a better option than using a simple model with both accelerometer and gyroscope when resource usage is to be reduced

A Two-Level Approach to Characterizing Human Activities from Wearable Sensor Data

International audienceThe rapid emergence of new technologies in recent decades has opened up a world of opportunities for a better understanding of human mobility and behavior. It is now possible to recognize human movements, physical activity and the environments in which they take place. And this can be done with high precision, thanks to miniature sensors integrated into our everyday devices. In this paper, we explore different methodologies for recognizing and characterizing physical activities performed by people wearing new smart devices. Whether it's smartglasses, smartwatches or smartphones, we show that each of these specialized wearables has a role to play in interpreting and monitoring moments in a user's life. In particular, we propose an approach that splits the concept of physical activity into two sub-categories that we call micro-and macro-activities. Micro-and macro-activities are supposed to have functional relationship with each other and should therefore help to better understand activities on a larger scale. Then, for each of these levels, we show different methods of collecting, interpreting and evaluating data from different sensor sources. Based on a sensing system we have developed using smart devices, we build two data sets before analyzing how to recognize such activities. Finally, we show different interactions and combinations between these scales and demonstrate that they have the potential to lead to new classes of applications, involving authentication or user profiling

A 'one-size-fits-most' walking recognition method for smartphones, smartwatches, and wearable accelerometers

The ubiquity of personal digital devices offers unprecedented opportunities to study human behavior. Current state-of-the-art methods quantify physical activity using 'activity counts,' a measure which overlooks specific types of physical activities. We proposed a walking recognition method for sub-second tri-axial accelerometer data, in which activity classification is based on the inherent features of walking: intensity, periodicity, and duration. We validated our method against 20 publicly available, annotated datasets on walking activity data collected at various body locations (thigh, waist, chest, arm, wrist). We demonstrated that our method can estimate walking periods with high sensitivity and specificity: average sensitivity ranged between 0.92 and 0.97 across various body locations, and average specificity for common daily activities was typically above 0.95. We also assessed the method's algorithmic fairness to demographic and anthropometric variables and measurement contexts (body location, environment). Finally, we have released our method as open-source software in MATLAB and Python.Comment: 39 pages, 4 figures (incl. 1 supplementary), and 5 tables (incl. 2 supplementary

Digital phenotyping and the development and delivery of health guidelines and behaviour change interventions

Lovatt and colleagues make the case that drinking guidelines informed by the experiences and behaviours of drinkers are likely to have increased relevance, credibility and efficacy. There is reason to believe that digital technologies such as crowdsourcing, social media, mobile digital devices and biosensing devices measure behaviours such as drinking with a level of detail and on a scale that has not been possible previously. The intensive measurement of behaviours enabled by these approaches, combined with appropriate modelling techniques, can reveal patterns of behaviours that, together with knowledge of the resultant negative or harmful consequences, can inform the development of improved guidelines