S. Omatu et al. (Eds.): IWANN 2009, Part II, LNCS 5518, pp. 796–799, 2009.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009
Activity Recognition from Accelerometer Data on a
Mobile Phone
Tomas Brezmes
1
, Juan-Luis Gorricho
2
, and Josep Cotrina
2
1
France Telecom R+D, Spain
tomas.brezmes@orange-ftgroup.com
2
Departamento de Telemática, UPC, Spain
{juanluis,jcotrina}@entel.upc.edu
Abstract. Real-time monitoring of human movements can be easily envisaged
as a useful tool for many purposes and future applications. This paper presents
the implementation of a real-time classification system for some basic human
movements using a conventional mobile phone equipped with an accelerometer.
The aim of this study was to check the present capacity of conventional mobile
phones to execute in real-time all the necessary pattern recognition algorithms
to classify the corresponding human movements. No server processing data is
involved in this approach, so the human monitoring is completely decentralized
and only an additional software will be required to remotely report the human
monitoring. The feasibility of this approach opens a new range of opportunities
to develop new applications at a reasonable low-cost.
Keywords: Pattern recognition, human movement’s detection, accelerometer.
1 Introduction
An aging population is one of the main concerns of present administrations. Thinking
about new health-care paradigms to diminish the expected ever increasing health-care
budget is becoming a real necessity. Thankfully, recent progress in information com-
munication technologies and sensor miniaturization have provided the foundation for
the development of systems concerned with the remote supervision of home-based
physiological monitoring. In particular, a real-time monitoring of human movements
is expected to be a practical solution to monitor aged people or any human being who
needs to be under medical control.
At present there is an extended bibliography on the field of human movement’s de-
tection with studies considering wearable sensor units [1]-[3] or employing multiple
accelerometer units located on different body sites [4]-[7]. On the other hand, many
studies are devoted to improve or compare the accuracy of pattern recognition to
classify the human movements. The most commonly used techniques come from
applying artificial intelligence principles: decision trees, k-nearest neighbors, neural
networks, support vector machine, etc. [7]-[9].
This paper exposes the implementation of a real-time classification system for
some representative human movements: walking, climbing-up stairs, climbing-down