SmartARM: A smartphone-based group activity recognition and monitoring scheme for military applications

In this paper we propose SmartARM — a Smartphone-based group Activity Recognition and Monitoring (ARM) scheme, which is capable of recognizing and centrally monitoring coordinated group and individual group member activities of soldiers in the context of military excercises. In this implementation, we specifically consider military operations, where the group members perform similar motions or manoeuvres on a mission. Additionally, remote administrators at the command center receive data from the smartphones on a central server, enabling them to visualize and monitor the overall status of soldiers in situations such as battlefields, urban operations and during soldier's physical training. This work establishes — (a) the optimum position of smartphone placement on a soldier, (b) the optimum classifier to use from a given set of options, and (c) the minimum sensors or sensor combinations to use for reliable detection of physical activities, while reducing the data-load on the network. The activity recognition modules using the selected classifiers are trained on available data-sets using a test-train-validation split approach. The trained models are used for recognizing activities from live smartphone data. The proposed activity detection method puts forth an accuracy of 80% for real-time data.