Wearable System for Daily Activity Recognition Using Inertial and Pressure Sensors of a Smart Band and Smart Shoes

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a challenging task in the field of human-related signal processing. Owing to the development of wearable sensing technology, an emerging research approach in HAR is to identify user-performed tasks by using data collected from wearable sensors. In this paper, we propose a novel system for monitoring and recognizing daily living activities using an off-the-shelf smart band and two smart shoes. The system aims at providing a useful tool for solving problems regarding body part placement, fusion of multimodal sensors and feature selection for a specific set of activities. The system collects inertial and plantar pressure data at wrist and foot to analyze and then, extract, select important features for recognition. We construct and compare two predictive models of classifying activities from the reduced feature set. A comparison of the classification for each wearable device and a fusion scheme is provided to identify the best body part for activity recognition: either the wrist or the feet. This comparison also demonstrated the effective HAR performance of the proposed system.