Accelerometry-based classification of human activities using Markov Modeling

  • Authors:
  • Andrea Mannini;Angelo Maria Sabatini

  • Affiliations:
  • Scuola Superiore Sant' Anna, Piazza dei Martiri della Libertà 33, Pisa, Italy;Scuola Superiore Sant' Anna, Piazza dei Martiri della Libertà 33, Pisa, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience - Special issue on Selected Papers from the 4th International Conference on Bioinspired Systems and Cognitive Signal Processing
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Accelerometers are a popular choice as body-motion sensors: the reason is partly in their capability of extracting information that is useful for automatically inferring the physical activity in which the human subject is involved, beside their role in feeding biomechanical parameters estimators. Automatic classification of human physical activities is highly attractive for pervasive computing systems, whereas contextual awareness may ease the human-machine interaction, and in biomedicine, whereas wearable sensor systems are proposed for long-term monitoring. This paper is concerned with the machine learning algorithms needed to performthe classification task. HiddenMarkovModel (HMM) classifiers are studied by contrasting them with Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) classifiers. HMMs incorporate the statistical information available on movement dynamics into the classification process, without discarding the time history of previous outcomes as GMMs do. An example of the benefits of the obtained statistical leverage is illustrated and discussed by analyzing two datasets of accelerometer time series.