Context-Aware Data Processing to Enhance Quality of Measurements in Wireless Health Systems: An Application to MET Calculation of Exergaming Actions

Wireless health systems enable remote and continuous monitoring of individuals, with applications in elderly care support, chronic disease management, and preventive care. The underlying sensing platform provides constructs that consider the quality of information driven from the system and ensure the reliability/validity of the outcomes to support the decision-making processes. In this paper, we present an approach to integrate contextual information within the data processing flow in order to improve the quality of measurements. We focus on a pilot application that uses wearable motion sensors to calculate metabolic equivalent of task (MET) of exergaming movements. Exergames need to show energy expenditure values, often using accelerometer approximations applied to general activities. We focus on two contextual factors, namely “activity type” and “sensor location,” and demonstrate how these factors can be used to enhance the measured values, since allocating larger weights to more informative sensors can improve the final measurements. Further, designing regression models for each activity provides better results than any generalized model. Indeed, the averaged R2 value for the movements using simple sensor location improve from a general 0.71 to as high as 0.84 for an individual activity type. The different methods present a range of R2 value averages across activity type from 0.64 for sensor location to 0.89 for multidimensional regression, with an average game play MET value of 7.93. Finally, in a leaveone-subject-out cross validation, a mean absolute error of 2.231 METs is found when predicting the activity levels using the best models.