Classification and suitability of sensing technologies for activity recognition

Abstract

Wider availability of sensors and sensing systems has pushed research in the direction of automatic activity recognition (AR) either for medical or other personal benefits e.g. wellness or fitness monitoring. Researchers apply di↵erent AR techniques/algorithms and use a wide range of sensors to discover home activities. However, it seems that the AR algorithms are purely technology-driven rather than informing studies on the type and quality of input required. There is an expectation to over-instrument the environment or the subjects and then develop AR algorithms, where instead the problem should be approached from a di↵erent angle i.e. what sensors (type, quality and quantity) a given algorithm requires to infer particular activities with a certain confidence? This paper introduces the concept of activity recognition, its taxonomy and familiarises the reader with sub-classes of sensor-based AR. Furthermore, it presents an overview of existing health services Telecare and Telehealth solutions, and introduces the hierarchical taxonomy of human behaviour analysis tasks. This work is a result of a systematic literature review and it presents the reader with a comprehensive set of home-based activities of daily living (ADL) and sensors proven to recognise these activities. Apart from reviewing usefulness of various sensing technologies for homebased AR algorithms, it highlights the problem of technology-driven cycle of development in this area. IntroductionIn the last two decades sensors have become cheaper, smaller and widely available, residing at the edge of the Internet. Some such examples are wearable personal activity (PA) trackers (e.g. Fitbit, Nike+ FuelBand, etc.). However, the available commercial o↵-the-shelf (COTS) sensors are only capable of 'sensing' a small subset of user activities -mostly outdoor sport activities (type of activity, distance covered, time taken, etc.) and estimation of additional information such as energy expenditure (either kcal or self-crafted metrics e.g. Nike's fuel-points). However, a large part of our lives, and increasingly so in the advanced age, is spent in the home, yet very little is known about our activities and behaviour in there.We are surrounded by a multitude of sensing devices and Mark Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing [120] is starting to materialise in the advances made in embedded networked systems currently addressed as the Internet of Things (IoT). The significant increase in devices streaming low-level information over the Web presents many new challenges. Whilst many researchers present this as a big data challenge, we believe that many of the environments and applications will require to justify the value and process relatively small data, making this a two-faceted problem requiring to consider the highly distributed, non-interoperable, small and relatively "lonely" data. E cient and accurate activity recognition (AR) algorithms are needed in order to make sense of this data and provide useful/actionable information and services in the human...

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