Recognizing movements from the ground reaction force

This paper presents a novel approach to movement recognition, using the vertical component of a person's Ground Reaction Force (GRF). Typical primitive movements such as taking a step, jumping, drop-landing, sitting down, rising to stand and crouching are decomposed and recognized in terms of the GRF signal observed by a weight sensitive floor. Previous works focused on vision processing for movement recognition. This work provides a new sensor modality for a larger research effort, that of sentient computing, which is concerned with giving computers awareness of their environment and inhabitants.