Hierarchical linear models for energy prediction using inertial sensors: a comparative study for treadmill walking

Walking is a commonly available activity to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Accurately tracking and measuring calories expended during walking can improve user feedback and intervention measures. Inertial sensors are a promising measurement tool to achieve this purpose. An important aspect in mapping inertial sensor data to energy expenditure is the question of normalizing across physiological parameters. Common approaches such as weight scaling require validation for each new population. An alternative is to use a hierarchical approach to model subject-specific parameters at one level and cross-subject parameters connected by physiological variables at a higher level. In this paper, we evaluate an inertial sensor-based hierarchical model to measure energy expenditure across a target population. We first determine the optimal movement and physiological features set to represent data. Periodicity based features are more accurate (p < 0.1 per subject) when generalizing across populations. Weight is the most accurate parameter (p < 0.1 per subject) measured as percentage prediction error. We also compare the hierarchical model with a subject-specific regression model and weight exponent scaled models. Subject-specific models perform significantly better (p < 0.1 per subject) than weight exponent scaled models at all exponent scales whereas the hierarchical model performed worse than both. However, using an informed prior from the hierarchical model produces similar errors to using a subject-specific model with large amounts of training data (p < 0.1 per subject). The results provide evidence that hierarchical modeling is a promising technique for generalized prediction energy expenditure prediction across a target population in a clinical setting.