This paper aims to develop a cheap, comfortable and, specially, efficient system which controls the physical activity carried out by the user. For this purpose an extended approach to physical activity recognition is presented, based on the use of discrete variables which employ data from accelerometer sensors. To this end, an innovative selection, discretization and classification technique to make the recognition process in an efficient way and at low energy cost, is presented in this work based on Ameva discretization. Entire process is executed on the smartphone and on a wireless health monitoring system is used when the smartphone is not used taking into account the system energy consumption.