Accelerometer Based Transportation Mode Recognition on Mobile Phones

Recognizing the transportation modes of people’s daily living is an important research issue in the pervasive computing. Prior research in this field mainly uses Global Positioning System (GPS), Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) or their combination with accelerometer to recognize transportation modes, such as walking, driving, etc. In this paper, we will introduce transportation mode recognition on mobile phones only using embedded accelerometer. In order to deal with uncertainty of position and orientation of mobile phone, acceleration synthesization based method and acceleration decomposition based method are introduced. Performance comparison indicates that acceleration synthesization based method outperforms acceleration decomposition based method. We will discuss the factors affect the recognition accuracy of acceleration decomposition based method and present potential improvements.