Abstract
The analysis of daily living human behavior has proven to be of key importance to prevent unhealthy habits. The diversity of activities and the individuals’ particular execution style determine that several sources of information are normally required. One of the main issues is to optimally combine them to guarantee performance, scalability and robustness. In this paper we present a fusion classification methodology which takes into account the potential of the individual decisions yielded at both activity and sensor classification levels. Particularly tested on a wearable sensors based system, the method reinforces the idea that some parts of the body (i.e., sensors) may be specially informative for the recognition of each particular activity, thus supporting the ranking of the decisions provided by each associated sensor decision entity. Our method systematically outperforms the results obtained by traditional multiclass models which otherwise may require a high-dimensional feature space to acquire a similar performance. The comparison with other activity-recognition fusion approaches also demonstrates our model scales significantly better for small sensor networks.






Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.Notes
Other approaches as the one-versus-one may be similarly applied, but here, the one-versus-rest is particularly recommended to reduce the number of classification entities.
References
Allwein EL, Schapire RE, Singer Y, Kaelblin P (2000) Reducing multiclass to binary: a unifying approach for margin classifiers. J Mach Learn Res 1:113–141
Amft O, Lukowicz P (2009) From backpacks to smartphones: past, present, and future of wearable computers. Pervasive Computi IEEE 8(3):8–13
Banos O, Damas M, Pomares H, Rojas I (2011) Automatic recognition of daily living activities based on a hierarchical classifier. In: Advances in computational intelligence: 11th international work-conference on artificial neural networks, vol 6692. Springer, Berlin, pp 185–193
Banos O, Damas M, Pomares H, Prieto A, Rojas I (2012) Daily living activity recognition based on statistical feature quality group selection. Expert Syst Appl 39(9):8013–8021
Bao L, Intille SS (2004) Activity recognition from user-annotated acceleration data. Pervasive Comput 23:1–17
Bonomi AG, Plasqui G, Goris AHC, Westerterp KR (2009) Improving assessment of daily energy expenditure by identifying types of physical activity with a single accelerometer. J Appl Physiol 107(3):655–661
Bouten C, Koekkoek K, Verduin M, Kodde R, Janssen J (1997) A triaxial accelerometer and portable data processing unit for the assessment of daily physical activity. Biomed Eng IEEE Trans 44(3):136–147
Cover T, Hart P (1967) Nearest neighbor pattern classification. Inf Theory IEEE Trans 13(1):21–27
Cristianini N, Shawe-Taylor J (2000) An introduction to support vector machines: and other kernel-based learning methods. Cambridge University Press, New York
Duda RO, Hart PE, Stork DG (2000) Pattern classification, 2nd edn. Wiley-Interscience, New York
Ermes M, Parkka J, Mantyjarvi J, Korhonen I (2008) Detection of daily activities and sports with wearable sensors in controlled and uncontrolled conditions. IEEE Trans Inf Technol Biomed 12(1):20–26
European-Commission (2011) Ambient assisted living joint programme. http://www.aal-europe.eu/
He Z, Jin L (2009) Activity recognition from acceleration data based on discrete consine transform and svm. In: Systems, man and cybernetics, 2009. SMC 2009, IEEE international conference, pp 5041–5044
Kittler J, Hatef M, Duin R, Matas J (1998) On combining classifiers. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 20(3):226–239
Lester J, Choudhury T, Kern N, Borriello G, Hannaford B (2005) A hybrid discriminative/generative approach for modeling human activities. In: Proceedings of the 19th international joint conference on artificial intelligence, IJCAI’05. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, pp 766–772
Mantyjarvi J, Himberg J, Seppanen T (2001) Recognizing human motion with multiple acceleration sensors. In: Systems, man, and cybernetics, 2001 IEEE international conference, vol 2, pp 747–752
Mathie MJ, Coster ACF, Lovell NH, Celler BG (2004) Accelerometry: providing an integrated, practical method for long-term, ambulatory monitoring of human movement. Physiol Meas 25(2):1–20
Maurer U, Smailagic A, Siewiorek D, Deisher M (2006) Activity recognition and monitoring using multiple sensors on different body positions. In: Wearable and implantable body sensor networks, 2006. BSN 2006. International workshop on, pp 113–116
Parera J, Angulo C, Rodriguez-Molinero A, Cabestany J (2009) User daily activity classification from accelerometry using feature selection and svm. LNCS, vol 5517, pp 1137–1144
Parkka J, Ermes M, Korpipaa P, Mantyjarvi J, Peltola J, Korhonen I (2006) Activity classification using realistic data from wearable sensors. IEEE Trans Inf Technol Biomed 10(1):119–128
Pirttikangas S, Fujinami K, Seppanen T (2006) Feature selection and activity recognition from wearable sensors. In: Ubiquitous computing systems, third international symposium, LNCS, vol 4239, pp 516–527
Preece S, Goulermas J, Kenney L, Howard D (2009) A comparison of feature extraction methods for the classification of dynamic activities from accelerometer data. IEEE Trans Biomed Eng 56(3):871–879
Preece SJ, Goulermas JY, Kenney LPJ, Howard D, Meijer K, Crompton R (2009b) Activity identification using body-mounted sensors-a review of classification techniques. Physiol Meas 30(4):1–33
Ravi N, Mysore P, Littman ML (2005) Activity recognition from accelerometer data. In: In Proceedings of the seventeenth conference on innovative applications of artificial intelligence, pp 1541–1546
Roggen D, Calatroni A, Rossi M, Holleczek T, Forster K, Troster G, Lukowicz P, Bannach D, Pirkl G, Ferscha A, Doppler J, Holzmann C, Kurz M, Holl G, Chavarriaga R, Sagha H, Bayati H, Creatura M, del Millan JR (2010) Collecting complex activity datasets in highly rich networked sensor environments. In: Networked sensing systems (INSS), 2010 seventh international conference, pp 233–240
Sazonov E, Makeyev O, Schuckers S, Lopez-Meyer P, Melanson E, Neuman M (2010) Automatic detection of swallowing events by acoustical means for applications of monitoring of ingestive behavior. IEEE Trans Biomed Eng 57(3):626–633
Sazonov E, Metcalfe K, Lopez-Meyer P, Tiffany S (2011) Rf hand gesture sensor for monitoring of cigarette smoking. In: Sensing technology, 2011 fifth international conference, pp 426–430
Sharma R, Pavlovic V, Huang T (1998) Toward multimodal human-computer interface. In: Proceedings of the IEEE, vol 86, pp 853–869
Shephard RJ (2003) Limits to the measurement of habitual physical activity by questionnaires. Br J Sports Med 37(3):197–206
Staudenmayer J, Pober D, Crouter S, Bassett D, Freedson P (2009) An artificial neural network to estimate physical activity energy expenditure and identify physical activity type from an accelerometer. J Appl Physiol 107(4):1300–1307
Theodoridis S, Koutroumbas K (2008) Pattern recognition, 4th edn. Academic Press, London
Ward J, Lukowicz P, Troster G, Starner T (2006) Activity recognition of assembly tasks using body-worn microphones and accelerometers. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 28(10):1553–1567
Warren JM, Ekelund U, Besson H, Mezzani A, Geladas N, Vanhees L (2010) Assessment of physical activity a review of methodologies with reference to epidemiological research: a report of the exercise physiology section of the european association of cardiovascular prevention and rehabilitation. Eur J Cardiovas Prev Rehabil 17(2):127–139
WHO (2005) Global report, preventing chronic diseases: a vital investment tech rep. World Health Organization, Geneva
WHO (2006) American report, regional strategy on an integrated approach to the prevention and control of chronic diseases including diet, physical activity, and health: tech rep. World Health Organization, Geneva
Zappi P, Stiefmeier T, Farella E, Roggen D, Benini L, Troster G (2007) Activity recognition from on-body sensors by classifier fusion: sensor scalability and robustness. In: 3rd international conference on intelligent sensors, sensor networks and information, pp 281–286
Acknowledgments
We want to express our gratitude to Prof. Stephen S. Intille, Technology Director of the HouseN Consortium in the MIT Department of Architecture for the experimental data provided. This work was supported in part by the Spanish CICYT Project TIN2007-60587, Junta de Andalucia Projects P07-TIC-02768 and P07-TIC-02906, the CENIT project AmIVital, of the “Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnolgico Industrial” (CDTI-Spain), the FPU Spanish Grant AP2009-2244 and the UGR Spanish Grant “Iniciación a la Investigación 2010/2011”.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Banos, O., Damas, M., Pomares, H. et al. Human activity recognition based on a sensor weighting hierarchical classifier. Soft Comput 17, 333–343 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-012-0896-3
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-012-0896-3