We present results from a set of experiments in this pilot study to
investigate the causal influence of user activity on various environmental
parameters monitored by occupant carried multi-purpose sensors. Hypotheses with
respect to each type of measurements are verified, including temperature,
humidity, and light level collected during eight typical activities: sitting in
lab / cubicle, indoor walking / running, resting after physical activity,
climbing stairs, taking elevators, and outdoor walking. Our main contribution
is the development of features for activity and location recognition based on
environmental measurements, which exploit location- and activity-specific
characteristics and capture the trends resulted from the underlying
physiological process. The features are statistically shown to have good
separability and are also information-rich. Fusing environmental sensing
together with acceleration is shown to achieve classification accuracy as high
as 99.13%. For building applications, this study motivates a sensor fusion
paradigm for learning individualized activity, location, and environmental
preferences for energy management and user comfort.Comment: submitted to the 40th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial
Electronics Society (IECON
