Considerations for the Design of an Activity Recognition System Using Inertial Sensors

Abstract

The last decade there has been an increasing research interest in the field of human activity recognition in the frame of designing context-aware applications. There is a plethora of parameters that affect the performance of an activity recognition system. However, designers of such systems often either ignore some factors or even neglect their importance. In this paper, we present and discuss in detail research challenges in human activity recognition using inertial sensors, and we analyse the significance of the existent parameters during the design and the evaluation of such systems. We exemplify the role of the aforementioned parameters with an experiment that was conducted, in which 11 people performed 5 different activities. Data were recorded from the inertial sensors of a wrist-worn smartwatch. We illustrate how various parameters of the system can be configured and demonstrate how they impact the whole system’s performance. This work aims to be used as a concise reference for future endeavours in the field of human activity recognition using inertial sensors of mobile devices in general, and of wrist-worn smartwatches in particular.