InCense IoT: A Collective Sensing System for Behavior Data in Shared Spaces

Behavioral sensing systems collect data from smartphones, wearables, and other devices with the aim of analyzing and making sense of them. In this work, we present InCense IoT, a collective sensing system which uses mobile and ubiquitous sensors for collecting behavior data of groups of participants in shared spaces. This paper describes the concept of collective sensing, an implementation onto InCense called InCense IoT, innovative features, advantages over individual-centric sensing systems. Finally, this paper presents results of a use case using it in monitoring behaviors in mother-child interactions

Smartphone Location-Independent Physical Activity Recognition Based on Transportation Natural Vibration Analysis

Activity recognition through smartphones has been proposed for a variety of applications. The orientation of the smartphone has a significant effect on the recognition accuracy; thus, researchers generally propose using features invariant to orientation or displacement to achieve this goal. However, those features reduce the capability of the recognition system to differentiate among some specific commuting activities (e.g., bus and subway) that normally involve similar postures. In this work, we recognize those activities by analyzing the vibrations of the vehicle in which the user is traveling. We extract natural vibration features of buses and subways to distinguish between them and address the confusion that can arise because the activities are both static in terms of user movement. We use the gyroscope to fix the accelerometer to the direction of gravity to achieve an orientation-free use of the sensor. We also propose a correction algorithm to increase the accuracy when used in free living conditions and a battery saving algorithm to consume less power without reducing performance. Our experimental results show that the proposed system can adequately recognize each activity, yielding better accuracy in the detection of bus and subway activities than existing methods

Activity recognition invariant to sensor orientation with wearable motion sensors

Most activity recognition studies that employ wearable sensors assume that the sensors are attached at pre-determined positions and orientations that do not change over time. Since this is not the case in practice, it is of interest to develop wearable systems that operate invariantly to sensor position and orientation. We focus on invariance to sensor orientation and develop two alternative transformations to remove the effect of absolute sensor orientation from the raw sensor data. We test the proposed methodology in activity recognition with four state-of-the-art classifiers using five publicly available datasets containing various types of human activities acquired by different sensor configurations. While the ordinary activity recognition system cannot handle incorrectly oriented sensors, the proposed transformations allow the sensors to be worn at any orientation at a given position on the body, and achieve nearly the same activity recognition performance as the ordinary system for which the sensor units are not rotatable. The proposed techniques can be applied to existing wearable systems without much effort, by simply transforming the time-domain sensor data at the pre-processing stage. © 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland