Wearable-sensor activity analysis using semi-Markov models with a grammar

Detailed monitoring of training sessions of elite athletes is an important component of their training. In this paper we describe an application that performs a precise segmentation and labeling of swimming sessions. This allows a comprehensive breakdow

Hand Gesture and Activity Recognition in Assisted Living Through Wearable Sensing and Computing

With the growth of the elderly population, more seniors live alone as sole occupants of a private dwelling than any other population groups. Helping them to live a better life is very important and has great societal benefits. Assisted living systems can provide support to elderly people in their houses or apartments. Since automated recognition of human gestures and activities is indispensable for human-robot interaction (HRI) in assisted living systems, this dissertation focuses on developing a theoretical framework for human gesture, daily activity recognition and anomaly detection. First, we introduce two prototypes of wearable sensors for motion data collection used in this project. Second, gesture recognition algorithms are developed to recognize explicit human intention. Third, body activity recognition algorithms are presented with different sensor setups. Fourth, complex daily activities, which consist of body activities and hand gestures simultaneously, are recognized using a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN). Fifth, a coherent anomaly detection framework is built to detect four types of abnormal behaviors in human's daily life. Our work can be extended in several directions in the future.School of Electrical & Computer Engineerin

Ambulatory Monitoring Using Passive RFID Technology

Human activity recognition using wearable sensors is a growing field of study in pervasive computing that forms the basis for ubiquitous applications in areas like health care, manufacturing, human computer interaction and sports. A new generation of passive (batteryless) sensors such as sensor enabled RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags are creating new prospects for wearable sensor based applications. As passive sensors are lightweight and small, they can be used for unobtrusive monitoring. Furthermore, these sensors are maintenance free as they require no battery. However, recognising activities from passive sensor enabled RFID tags is challenging due to the sparse and noisy nature of the data streams from these sensors because they need to harvest adequate energy for successful operation. Therefore, within this thesis, we propose methods to recognise activities in real time using passive RFID technology by alleviating the adverse effects of sparsity and noise. We mainly consider ambulatory monitoring to facilitate mitigating falls in hospitals and older care settings as our application context. Specifically, three aspects are considered: i) data acquisition from sensor enabled RFID tags; ii) monitoring ambulatory movements using passive sensor enabled RFID tags to recognise activities leading to falls; and iii) detecting falls using a dense deployment of passive RFID tags. A generic middleware architecture and a generic tag ID format to embed sensor data and uniquely identify tag capabilities are proposed to acquire sensor data from passive sensor enabled RFID tags. The characteristics of this middleware are established using experiments with RFID readers and an example application scenario. In the context of ambulatory monitoring using passive sensor enabled RFID tags, first, an algorithm to facilitate the online interpolation of sparse accelerometer data from passive sensor enabled RFID tags is proposed followed by an investigation of features for activity recognition. Secondly, two data stream segmentation methods are proposed that can segment the data stream on possible activity boundaries to mitigate the adverse effects posed by data stream sparsity on segmentation. Thirdly, an algorithm to model the sequential nature considering previous sensor observations for a given time and their class labels to classify a sparse data stream in real time is proposed. Finally, a classification algorithm based on structured prediction is proposed to both segment and classify the sensor data stream simultaneously. The proposed methods are evaluated using four datasets that have been collected from a passive sensor enabled RFID tag with an accelerometer and successful monitoring of ambulatory movements is demonstrated to be possible by employing innovative data stream processing methods, based on machine learning. In order to detect falls, particularly long lie situation, using a dense deployment of passive RFID tags embedded in a carpet, an efficient and scalable machine learning based algorithm is proposed. This algorithm relies only on binary tag observation information. First, it identifies possible fall locations using heuristics and then the falls are identified using machine learning from features extracted considering possible fall locations alone. From an evaluation, it is demonstrated that the proposed algorithm could successfully identify falls in real time.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Computer Science, 201