Recognizing the Use of Portable Electrical Devices with Hand-Worn Magnetic Sensors

Abstract

The new method proposed here recognizes the use of portable electrical devices such as digital cameras, cellphones, electric shavers, and video game players with hand-worn magnetic sensors by sensing the magnetic fields emitted by these devices. Because we live surrounded by large numbers of electrical devices and frequently use these devices, we can estimate high-level daily activities by recognizing the use of electrical devices. Therefore, many studies have attempted to recognize the use of electrical devices with such approaches as ubiquitous sensing and infrastructure-mediated sensing. A feature of our method is that we can recognize the use of electrical devices that are not connected to the home infrastructure without the need for any ubiquitous sensors attached to the devices. We evaluated the performance of our recognition method in real home environments, and confirmed that we could achieve highly accurate recognition with small numbers of hand-worn magnetic sensors.