Sensor Positioning for Activity Recognition Using Wearable Accelerometers

• Published in: IEEE transactions on biomedical circuits and systems Vol. 5; no. 4; pp. 320 - 329
• Main Authors: Atallah, L., Lo, B., King, R., Guang-Zhong Yang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.08.2011; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Accelerometers; Biomedical monitoring; Body sensor networks (BSNs); Feature extraction; feature selection; Monitoring; Redundancy; sensor positioning; Surgery; Wearable sensors
• ISSN: 1932-4545; 1940-9990
• DOI: 10.1109/TBCAS.2011.2160540

Activities of daily living are important for assessing changes in physical and behavioral profiles of the general population over time, particularly for the elderly and patients with chronic diseases. Although accelerometers have been used widely in wearable devices for activity classification, the positioning of the sensors and the selection of relevant features for different activity groups still pose significant research challenges. This paper investigates wearable sensor placement at different body positions and aims to provide a systematic framework that can answer the following questions: 1) What is the ideal sensor location for a given group of activities? and 2) Of the different time-frequency features that can be extracted from wearable accelerometers, which ones are the most relevant for discriminating different activity types?