Recognizing Handheld Electrical Device Usage with Hand-Worn Coil of Wire

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a new finger-ring shaped sensor device with a coil of wire for recognizing the use of handheld electrical devices such as digital cameras, cellphones, electric toothbrushes, and hair dryers by sensing time-varying magnetic fields emitted by the devices. Recently, sensing the usage of home electrical devices has emerged as a promising area for activity recognition studies because we can estimate high-level daily activities by recognizing the use of electrical devices that exist ubiquitously in our daily lives. A feature of our approach is that we can recognize the use of electrical devices that are not connected to the home infrastructure without the need to equip them with sensors. We evaluated the performance of our approach by using sensor data obtained from real houses. We also investigated the portability of training data between different users.