Human activity recognition system using wearable accelerometers for classification of leg movements: a first, detailed approach

Abstract. A human activity recognition (HAR) system carried by masseurs for controlling a therapy table via different movements of legs or hip is studied. This work starts with a survey on HAR systems using the sensor position named “trouser pockets”. Afterwards, in the experiments, the impacts of different hardware systems, numbers of subjects, data generation processes (online streams/offline data snippets), sensor positions, sampling rates, sliding window sizes and shifts, feature sets, feature elimination processes, operating legs, tag orientations, classification processes (concerning method, parameters and an additional smoothing process), numbers of activities, training databases, and the use of a preceding teaching process on the classification accuracy are examined to get a thorough understanding of the variables influencing the classification quality. Besides the impacts of different adjustable parameters, this study also serves as an advisor for the implementation of classification tasks. The proposed system has three operating classes: do nothing, pump therapy table up or pump therapy table down. The first operating class consists of three activity classes (go, run, massage) such that the whole classification process exists with five classes. Finally, using online data streams, a classification accuracy of 98 % could be achieved for one skilled subject and about 90 % for one randomly chosen subject (mean of 1 skilled and 11 unskilled subjects). With the LOSO (leave-one-subject-out) technique for 12 subjects, up to 86 % can be attained. With our offline data approach, we get accuracies of 98 % for 12 subjects and up to 100 % for 1 skilled subject.