User-friendly system for recognition of activities with an accelerometer

Monitoring of a person's daily activities can provide valuable information for health care and prevention and can be an important supportive application in the field of ambient assisted living (AAL). The goals of this study are the classification of postures and activities using knowledge-based methods as well as the evaluation of the performance of these methods. The acceleration data are gained by a single tri-axial accelerometer, which is mounted on a specific position on the test subject. A data set for training and testing was gained by collecting data from subjects, who performed varying postures and activities. For these purposes, three different knowledge-based (decision tree and neural network) classification methods and a hybrid classifier were implemented, tested and evaluated. The results of the tests illustrated that the hybrid classifier performed best with an overall accuracy of 98.99%. The advantages of knowledge-based methods are the exchangeable knowledge base, which can be developed for different types of sensor positions and the state of health of the subject.