Transportation mode detection using kinetic energy harvesting wearables

Detecting the transportation mode of an individual's everyday travel provides useful information in urban design, real-time journey planning, and activity monitoring. In existing systems, accelerometer and GPS are the dominantly used signal sources which quickly drain the limited battery life of the wearable devices. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using the output voltage from the kinetic energy harvesting device as the signal source to achieve transportation mode detection. The proposed idea is based on the intuition that the vibrations experienced by the passenger during motoring of different transportation modes are different. Thus, voltage generated by the energy harvesting devices should contain distinctive features to distinguish different transportation modes. Using the dataset collected from a real energy harvesting device, we present the initial demonstration of the proposed method. We can achieve 98.84% of accuracy in determining whether the user is traveling by pedestrian or motorized modes, and in a fine-grained classification of three different motorized modes (car, bus, and train), an overall accuracy over 85% is achieved.