Activity Recognition in

Adaptive Assistive Systems

Using Artificial Neural Networks
Stefan Oniga, Jzsef St
University of Debrecen, Faculty of Informatics, Hungary

Goals
To develop technologies for independent daily life
assistance of elderly or sick persons.
Design a complex assistive system that can learn and
adapt due to the uses of artificial neural networks (ANN).
Design and test of several Matlab ANN models in order
to find the best performing architecture.
Finding necessary preprocessing of raw data aiming to
have a better recognition rate.
Optimization of the number of sensors and their
placement in order to obtain the best trade-off
between recognition rate and the complexity of the
recognition system.

Human activity and health parameters

monitoring system
The system was developed for human activity and health
parameters monitoring
temperature, heart rate, acceleration
Focuses on studies and results obtained on
arm posture recognition,
body posture recognition
usual activities recognition:
lying on various sides, sitting, standing, walking, running,
descending or climbing stairs etc..

Activity/health monitoring system (version 1)

Chronos watch from TI as acceleration data source

Chest belt from BM Innovations as heart rate data source.
The receiver were built-up from a ChipKit Max32, a Wi-Fi shield and a
communication shield that holds the BM receiver and the TI access point.

Monitoring system block diagram

Wearable watch sized monitoring system

ADXL350 acceleration sensor from Analog Devices,

CC2541 low power SoC for Bluetooth low energy (BLE), from TI
TPS61220 Step-Up (Boost) converter.
The tag is powered by a single coin cell battery (CR2032).

Human activity and health status recognition

Research directions
development of a Matlab model of activity recognition system
that use artificial neural network (ANN)
development of hardware implemented RT recognition system
Finding ANN model with good performance which is also easy to
implement in hardware is not exactly an easy task
We concluded that good results could be obtained with
two-layer FF-BP network, with sigmoid activation function
We have chosen Levenberg-Marquardt training method
For performance evaluation we used the MSE function.

Arm posture recognition

6 arm postures
Acceleration data are supplied by TI Chronos smart watch
The ANN model is presented
The recognition rate was 100 % on the data used for training

Body posture recognition

5 body postures (sitting, prone, supine, left lateral recumbent and
right lateral recumbent.)
Chronos watch fixed on chest
ANN with 10 neurons on hidden and 5 neurons on the output layer.
The recognition rate was 99.96%, MSE = 3.6747e-004
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Samples

Activity recognition
activities to be recognized
1. Standing,

10. Left bending

2. Sitting

11. Right bending

3. Supine

12. Squats

4. Prone

13. Standing up/Sitting down

5. Left lateral recumbent

14 .Falls

6. Right lateral recumbent

15. Turns left and right

7. Walking

16. Climbing stairs

8. Running

17. Descending stairs

9. Bending forward

Transitions

Using 27 samples/second rate we acquired 600 samples for each

activity, from three acceleration sensor

Optimizing activity recognition

Research directions:
test of several Matlab ANN models for activity recognition in
order to find the best performing architecture
finding the necessary preprocessing of raw data aiming to have
a better recognition rate (as Mean value, Variance, Energy,
Correlation coefficients, Frequency-Domain Entropy, Log FFT
Frequency Bands, etc. )
finding the number of sensors and their optimal placement

Preprocessing of raw data

The standard deviation (SD)could be used with very good results as
a supplementary input data for the neurons.
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ANN input data

X-Acc, Y-Acc, Z-Acc, X+Y+Z-Acc
X-Acc, Y-Acc, Z-Acc, X+Y+Z-Acc, Std_w600(X+Y+Z-Acc)

95.44%
96.28%

X-Acc, Y-Acc, Z-Acc, X+Y+Z-Acc, Std_w50(X+Y+Z-Acc)1

98.06%

X-Acc, Y-Acc, Z-Acc, X+Y+Z-Acc, Std_w50(X+Y+Z-Acc)2

98.07%

X-Acc, Y-Acc, Z-Acc, X+Y+Z-Acc, Std_w50(X+Y+Z-Acc)3

97.81%

X-Acc, Y-Acc, Z-Acc, X+Y+Z-Acc, Std_w50(X+Y+Z-Acc)4

96.28%

Recognition rates as function of

sensors arrangements
We acquired 600 samples for each activity, from three acceleration
sensors placed on: the right hand (Acc1), above the right knee (Acc2)
one on the chest (Acc3)
Recognition rates for static activities

Recognition rates for dynamic activities

Comparison between recognition rates for

static and selected dynamic activities
For static activities the recognition rates are between 0.5% limits for all
possible combinations.
For all dynamic activities the best results could be obtained using the two
accelerometers setup and an ANN with 2 hidden layers.
For the selected dynamic activities we obtained good results even for
the one accelerometer setup (Acc2) => we can use a simpler ANN with
one hidden layer with only 20 neurons.

Conclusions
The use of ANN was found to be very effective even for
architectures with one hidden layer with 20 neurons.
Even using a single 3-axis acceleration tag combined with
proper signal preprocessing e.g., mean, standard deviation,
etc. very high recognition rates can be obtained.
As expected the recognition rate for the static activities was
better than for dynamic activities.
We also implemented and tested a real time recognition
system using Raspberry Pi mini-computer.
Further research will be made regarding the best performing,
hardware implementation friendly, ANN.

Thank you for your attention!