Motion sensor data anonymization by time-frequency filtering

Recent advances in wireless actimetry sensors allow recognizing human real-time activities with mobile devices. Although the analysis of data generated by these devices can have many benefits for healthcare, these data also contains private information about users without their awareness and may even cause their re-identification. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving framework for activity recognition. The method consists of a two-step process. First, acceleration signals are encoded in the time-frequency domain by three different linear transforms. Second, we propose a method to anonymize the acceleration signals by filtering in the time-frequency domain. Finally, we evaluate our approach for the three different linear transforms with a neural network classifier by comparing the performances for activity versus identity recognition. We extensively study the validity of our framework with a reference dataset: results show an accurate activity recognition (85%) while limiting the re-identifation rate (32%). This represents a large utility improvement (19%) against a slight privacy decrease (10%) compared to state-of-the-art baseline.