RECOGNITION AND CLASSIFICATION OF HUMAN ACTIVITIES USING WEARABLE SENSORS

RECOGNITION AND CLASSIFICATION OF HUMAN ACTIVITIES USING WEARABLE SENSORS Aras Yurtman M.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Billur Barshan September 2012 We address the problem of detecting and classifying human activities using two different types of wearable sensors. In the first part of the thesis, a comparative study on the different techniques of classifying human activities using tag-based radio-frequency (RF) localization is provided. Position data of multiple RF tags worn on the human body are acquired asynchronously and non-uniformly. Curves fitted to the data are re-sampled uniformly and then segmented. The effect of varying the relevant system parameters on the system accuracy is investigated. Various curve-fitting, segmentation, and classification techniques are compared and the combination resulting in the best performance is presented. The classifiers are validated through the use of two different cross-validation methods. For the complete classification problem with 11 classes, the proposed system demonstrates an average classification error of 8.67% and 21.30% for 5-fold and subject-based leave-one-out (L1O) cross validation, respectively. When the number of classes is reduced to five by omitting the transition classes, these errors become 1.12% and 6.52%. The system demonstrates acceptable classification performance despite that tag-based RF localization does not provide very accurate position measurements. In the second part, data acquired from five sensory units worn on the human body, each containing a tri-axial accelerometer, a gyroscope, and a magnetometer, during 19 different human activities are used to calculate inter-subject and interactivity variations in the data with different methods. Absolute, Euclidean, and dynamic time-warping (DTW) distances are used to assess the similarity of the signals. The comparisons are made using time-domain data and feature vectors. Different normalization methods are used and compared. The “best” subject is defined and identified according to his/her average distance to the other subjects.