User Recognition based on Gait Pattern via Smartwatch Accelerometer in Unrestricted Environment

Wearable gadgets are becoming a major constituent of our society due to a wide range of applications like financial transactions, unlocking automobiles, tracking health and fitness, and many more. Personal data is usually required to manage these services, however, most commercially available wearables devices either lack a user authentication mechanism or employ knowledge-based authentication like passwords, PINs, or pattern locks. In this growing digital age, it is really difficult for an individual to memorize such a huge number of passwords. In this research, we put forward a technique for recognizing users from their walking patterns recorded in real-life settings using a smartwatch accelerometer sensor. Ensemble classification techniques (bagging and boosting) are used for the purpose of user identification using the selected time domain features. Our proposed method attained the highest classification accuracy of 88.35% which transcends the existing user recognition schemes available in the literature.