Activity recognition using accelerometer sensor and machine learning classifiers

Activity recognition is considered as an important task in many applications, particularly in healthcare services. Among these applications include medical diagnostic, monitoring of users' daily routine and detection of abnormal cases. This paper presents an approach for the activity recognition using an accelerometer sensor embedded in a smartphone. This approach uses a publicly available accelerometer dataset as the raw input signal. The features of the signal are selected based on the time and frequency domain. Then, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is used to reduce the dimensionality of the features and extract the most significant ones that can classify human activities. A comparison process is performed between the original raw data and PCA-based features and additionally, time and frequency-domain features are also compared using several machine learning classifiers. The obtained results show that the PCA-based features obtain higher recognition rate while frequency-domain features have higher accuracy, with the rate of 96.11% and 92.10% respectively.