The current gold standard for human activity recognition (HAR) is based on
the use of cameras. However, the poor scalability of camera systems renders
them impractical in pursuit of the goal of wider adoption of HAR in mobile
computing contexts. Consequently, researchers instead rely on wearable sensors
and in particular inertial sensors. A particularly prevalent wearable is the
smart watch which due to its integrated inertial and optical sensing
capabilities holds great potential for realising better HAR in a non-obtrusive
way. This paper seeks to simplify the wearable approach to HAR through
determining if the wrist-mounted optical sensor alone typically found in a
smartwatch or similar device can be used as a useful source of data for
activity recognition. The approach has the potential to eliminate the need for
the inertial sensing element which would in turn reduce the cost of and
complexity of smartwatches and fitness trackers. This could potentially
commoditise the hardware requirements for HAR while retaining the functionality
of both heart rate monitoring and activity capture all from a single optical
sensor. Our approach relies on the adoption of machine vision for activity
recognition based on suitably scaled plots of the optical signals. We take this
approach so as to produce classifications that are easily explainable and
interpretable by non-technical users. More specifically, images of
photoplethysmography signal time series are used to retrain the penultimate
layer of a convolutional neural network which has initially been trained on the
ImageNet database. We then use the 2048 dimensional features from the
penultimate layer as input to a support vector machine. Results from the
experiment yielded an average classification accuracy of 92.3%. This result
outperforms that of an optical and inertial sensor combined (78%) and
illustrates the capability of HAR systems using...Comment: 26th AIAI Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive
Scienc