A Bottom-up method Towards the Automatic and Objective Monitoring of Smoking Behavior In-the-wild using Wrist-mounted Inertial Sensors

The consumption of tobacco has reached global epidemic proportions and is characterized as the leading cause of death and illness. Among the different ways of consuming tobacco (e.g., smokeless, cigars), smoking cigarettes is the most widespread. In this paper, we present a two-step, bottom-up algorithm towards the automatic and objective monitoring of cigarette-based, smoking behavior during the day, using the 3D acceleration and orientation velocity measurements from a commercial smartwatch. In the first step, our algorithm performs the detection of individual smoking gestures (i.e., puffs) using an artificial neural network with both convolutional and recurrent layers. In the second step, we make use of the detected puff density to achieve the temporal localization of smoking sessions that occur throughout the day. In the experimental section we provide extended evaluation regarding each step of the proposed algorithm, using our publicly-available, realistic Smoking Event Detection (SED) and Free-living Smoking Event Detection (SED-FL) datasets recorded under semi-controlled and free-living conditions, respectively. In particular, leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) experiments reveal an F1-score of 0.863 for the detection of puffs and an F1-score/Jaccard index equal to 0.878/0.604 towards the temporal localization of smoking sessions during the day. Finally, to gain further insight, we also compare the puff detection part of our algorithm with a similar approach found in the recent literature.