GeSmart: A gestural activity recognition model for predicting behavioral health

To promote independent living for elderly population activity recognition based approaches have been investigated deeply to infer the activities of daily living (ADLs) and instrumental activities of daily living (I-ADLs). Deriving and integrating the gestural activities (such as talking, coughing, and deglutition etc.) along with activity recognition approaches can not only help identify the daily activities or social interaction of the older adults but also provide unique insights into their long-term health care, wellness management and ambulatory conditions. Gestural activities (GAs), in general, help identify fine-grained physiological symptoms and chronic psychological conditions which are not directly observable from traditional activities of daily living. In this paper, we propose GeSmart, an energy efficient wearable smart earring based GA recognition model for detecting a combination of speech and non-speech events. To capture the GAs we propose to use only the accelerometer sensor inside our smart earring due to its energy efficient operations and ubiquitous presence in everyday wearable devices. We present initial results and insights based on a C4.5 classification algorithm to infer the infrequent GAs. Subsequently, we propose a novel change-point detection based hybrid classification method exploiting the emerging patterns in a variety of GAs to detect and infer infrequent GAs. Experimental results based on real data traces collected from 10 users demonstrate that this approach improves the accuracy of GAs classification by over 23%, compared to previously proposed pure classification-based solutions. We also note that the accelerometer sensor based earrings are surprisingly informative and energy efficient (by 2.3 times) for identifying different types of GAs.