Proceeding of NCRIET-2015 & Indian J.Sci.Res.

12(1):007-012, 2015

ISSN: 0976-2876 (Print)

ISSN: 2250-0138 (Online)

CHILD ACTIVITY RECOGNITION USING ACCELEROMETERS

A.M. ANUSHAa1, RAVIKANT BELAGALIb, MAHENDRACHARIc AND PRASHANT
SANGULAGId
ab

Department of E&CE, BEC Bagalkot, India

Department of E&CE, BIET Davanagere, India
d
Department of E&CE, BKIT Bhalki, India

ABSTRACT
Babies usually start walking between 9 and 16 months, they are at the risk of falling from furniture or
stairs, and there are chances of moving into the dangerous zones/places like near water tank, near to fired zone or
holding electric sockets etc. Its impossible for the parents or caretakers for all the time to monitor the each and every
activity of their children. In children younger than four years of age, most fall-related injuries occur at home. Thus
new safety management methods are required to prevent the child from home accidents. In order to avoid these
dangerous activities of the child the fall prevention methods are need to be addressed. In this paper we have classified
the daily activities of the child into safe activities and dangerous activities accordingly prevention methods are
implemented for the dangerous activities.
KEYWORDS:

Babies of age 6-12 months are at a more

risk to fall from furniture or stairs and their
activities may be dangerous for which parents are
more worried. Falls are the main cause to injuries
in children. For children less than 2 years most of
the fall occur at home hence there is a need of the
sensor system which monitor the activities of the
children which is more useful for the working
parents as it is impossible for them to keep
monitoring their babies all the time. This proposed
system will help parents to take care of their
children who are less than 2 years. Child activity
recognition approach using accelerometer worn on
the body of a baby to prevent from accidents such
as unintentional injuries at home. To recognize
daily activities of the child and also to monitor the
child activities up to the accuracy of 90%. Almost
eight child activities which are common in all most
all children are implemented in this paper. This
proposed system can also be used in hospitals to
monitor patient time to time. The activities are
updated to the doctors frequently hence it is useful
for the doctors to give remote treatment and also
doctors can change the treatment according to the
need[F. Foerster 1999].

activities are classified into normal and dangerous

activities. The normal activities includes the childs
regular movements like sitting down, standing still,
toddling crawling etc. The dangerous activities are
child holding the electric sockets, child moving
towards the water pool etc. Smoke sensor is used to
detect any leakage of LPG and temperature sensor
detect the high temperature in childs environment.
This system also includes the buzzer to be alarmed
for the dangerous activities of the children. All the
activities of the children are updated to their
parents via GSM unit used in the proposed system.
Once the parents got the message about their
childs activities they can take remote parental care.
Overall child activities are represented in pie chart.
Block diagram of the proposed system

METHODOLOGY
The activities of the child are sensed by
the accelerometer and the analog values are sent to
the microcontroller. Microcontroller converts these
analog values to digital values and also processes
the data to give voltage values these voltage values
are displayed onto the LCD. Then it will send the
message to the parents through the GSM. The child

Figure 1: block diagram showing the

interconnection of sensors with microcontroller is
the heart of the system which controls all the
components. to observe the child and to show all

1
Corresponding author
Organized by Department of E&CE, Bheemanna Khandrre Institute of Technology Bhalki, Bidar, India

ANUSHA ET AL.: CHILD ACTIVITY RECOGNITION USING ACCELEROMETERS

the activities of the child in home or hospitals

accelerometers and RFID card is used, where
accelerometers detects the child presence and
falling stages through its axis and RFID card will
be read by RFID reader which is attached to the
bulky items near to the dangerous areas. When
child moves towards a table or bulky material
which is harmful to the child, buzzer is used to
alarm when child comes towards the dangerous
areas. These activities of the child are analyzed and
are sent to the parents mobile in the form of
text/voice messages via GSM. Android application
is developed using eclipse software which enables
the parents to observe their children activities
remotely which is helpful for them to take care of
their children. This android application also sends
the graph in the form of pie chart which indicates
the overall activities of the child.

HARDWARE COMPONENTS USED

Renasas microcontroller (R5F100LE):
Renasas microcontroller has 16 bit general
purpose register, ROM of 512 KB, RAM of 32 KB,
data flash memory of 8KB. It has on-chip highspeed oscillator. It requires low power. It has onchip debug function. It is having high number of
redundant input output ports which is essentially
required for this system as this system has the job
of activity monitoring.
Accelerometer (ADXL335)
The ADXL335 is a small, thin, low
power, complete 3-axis accelerometer with signal
conditioned voltage outputs. The product measures
acceleration with a minimum full-scale range of
3g. It can measure the static acceleration of
gravity in tilt-sensing application, as well as
dynamic acceleration resulting from motion, shock
or vibration. User selects the bandwidth of the
accelerometer using CX, CY and CZ capacitors at
the XOUT, YOUT and ZOUT pins. Bandwidth can
be selected to suit the application, with a range of
0.5Hz to 1600 Hz for the X and Y axis, and a range
of 0.5 Hz to 550 Hz for the Z axis. It has the
dimension of 4mm4mm1.45mm LFCSP. It
requires the operating voltage of 1.8v to 3.6v. the
temperature stability of the accelerometer is
excellent which is the essential factor needed for
this system [L. Baoand 2004].

measuring electrode and heater are fixed into a

crust made by plastic and stainless steel net. The
heater provides necessary work conditions for the
sensitive components. Sensor has 6 pins out of
them four are used to fetch signals, and other two
are used for providing heating content. In the
proposed system smoke sensor using LM358. The
smoke sensor used is less sensitive to alchohol,
smoke. It has fast response which is more
advantageous to the system developed.
Temperture Sensor (LM35)
The LM35 series are precision
integrated-circuit temperature sensors, whose
output voltage is linearly proportional to the
Celsius (Centigrade) temperature. The LM35 thus
has an advantage over linear temperature sensors
calibrated in Kelvin as output is obtained in
centigrade scaling. It has liner + 10.0 mV/oC scale
factor. It is suitable for remote applications and is
of low cost. Its operating voltage is from 4 to 30
volt.
RFID
Radio-frequency identification is an
automatic identification method, relaying on
storing and remotely retrieving data using devices
called RFID tags or transponders. RFID reader is
attached to the bulky items near to dangerous
zones, when the child moves towards those zones
automatically buzzer will make the alarm. RFID
tag is an object that can be applied to or
incorporated into a product, animal or person for
the purpose of identification and tracking using
radio waves. Advanced tags can be read from
several meters away and beyond the line of sight of
the reader [N. Ravi, N 2005].
Alpha Numeric LCD
A liquid crystal display (LCD) is a flat
panel display based on liquid crystal technology. It
consists of array of tiny segments called pixels
which is mainly used for display the information.
Liquid crystals do not emit light directly instead
they use light modulating techniques. LCDs are
more preferred in many applications because the
size comes in wider varities, they do not use
phosphor hence images are not burnt-in, low power
consumption, it has safer disposal and energy
efficiency is more.

Smoke Sensor
Smoke sensor consists of micro AL203
ceramic tube, tin Dioxide (Sn02) sensitive layer,

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ANUSHA ET AL.: CHILD ACTIVITY RECOGNITION USING ACCELEROMETERS

Piezo Buzzer

Overall System Design

It is an electronic component mainly

used to produce sound. It is used in various
applications because of its low cost, light weight. It
works on the inverse function of piezo electric
effect.. pizeo electric effect is nothing but
generating the electricity with the application of
pressure.pizeo buzzer used in this system is driven
by the square wave (Vp-p). It works within the
temperature range of -300 c to +700c.
GSM
Global
System
for
Mobile
communication (GSM0 is globally accepted
standard for digital cellular communication.
SIM300 is a Tri-band GSM?GPRS engine that
works on frequencies EGSM 900 MHz, DCS 1800
MHz and PCS 1900 MHz. AT commands can be
used to get information is SIM card. Both 1.8V and
3.0V

SOFTWARE TOOLS
Cube Suite+
Cube suite+ is one of the tools for the
renasas microcontroller. It is useful in building all
embedded development systems. The main
advantage of cube suite+ over the other tools is that
CS+ offers a highly user friendly development
environment, it has shorter build time and it offers
a graphical debug functions. It is also compatible
for the on-chip debugging emulator E1
Eclipse Software Development Kit
Android application for the child
activity recognition is developed using the tool
called Eclipse software development kit. Eclipse is
an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It
is mainly written in java and primarily used for
developing the java applications. Eclipse tool
provides the virtual device for checking the
application developed. once the application is
running fine in the virtual device of the tool kit one
can able to download the particular android
application in to their android mobiles.

Figure 2: Overall System Circuit Diagram

The system is initialized by swiping the
RFID card. The welcome statement is displayed on
the LCD when the activities are done by the child,
accelerometer which is connected to the body of
the child sensed those activities of the child and
extracted analog voltage values are converted into
digital voltage values by renasas microcontroller.
These voltage values are displayed on the LCD, at
the same time the message is sent to the parents
mobile through GSM [F. Wu 2005].
Smoke sensor detects the leakage of
gas and temperature sensor detects the high
temperature in childs environment. For the
dangerous activities voice output is sent to the
parents mobile. Three accelerometers are used
these are mounted on leg, hand and back for which
the data about the activities are collected correctly.

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ANUSHA ET AL.: CHILD ACTIVITY RECOGNITION USING ACCELEROMETERS

Flow Chart of over all working of the system

Flow Chart for Android Application Login

Figure 4: Flow Diagram for Android Login

GSM is initialized by entering the
username and password. If the username and
password is matched then login is success. If the
username and password is not matched then login
fails.
Flow Chart For Sending Message

Figure 3: Flow Chart Which Shows the

Working of the Proposed System
From the above flow diagram, it is seen
that the device is initialized by initializing the I?O
ports and then displaying the welcome statement on
the LCD display. In the next step UART is
initialized which is used for serial communication.
System will read ADC values of sensors and is
compared with the reference values, if reference
values are comparable with the sensor values then
activity is recognized and message is displayed on
the LCD, the same message is sent to the android
mobile via GSM these steps are performed for the
recognition of daily activities of the child. To
recognize the dangerous activities RFID card is
read by the RFID reader, if RFID information is
equal to the database information and message is
displayed on LCD accordingly buzzer makes the
alarm.

Figure 5: Flow Diagram to Send Message

For sending messages user needs to
ente the phone number, type the text and to press
the send button. If message is delivered then
message is sent successfully. If there is any
problem in the network or entered number is

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ANUSHA ET AL.: CHILD ACTIVITY RECOGNITION USING ACCELEROMETERS

invalid or there is no balance, the message is not

delivered.

Figure 6: flow diagram to receive messages

Sent messages are received by the
broadcast receiver. Receiver will check the number
if subscriber wants to open the message then
message is successfully displayed. If the message is
not opened message is deleted.

Flow Chart for Receiving Message

ANALYSIS AND RESULT

The table above specifies the predictive
voltage values for each of the child activities. All
the above mentioned activities are sensed by the
accelerometer and the analog values are sent to the
microcontroller
unit
for
processing
and
corresponding voltage values are displayed.
Standing still is considered as an idle position. If
the baby changes its position from standing still to
any of the other positions the accelerometers will
senses the activity and analog values are converted
into digital values in the voltage format. The
classification between walking and toddling
activities are more difficult than the classification
between other activities.
Table1: Indication of voltage levels for different activities
CHILD ACTIVITES

LEG (VOLTS)

HAND (VOLTS)

STANDING STILL
WALKING
TODDLING
WIGGLING
CRAWLING
ROLLING
TWIDDLING

1.32
1.40
1.62
1.30
1.37
1.62
1.57

1.38
1.67
1.84
1.42
1.36
1.79
1.41

BACK (VOLTS)
X
1.30
1.30
1.30
1.35
1.67
1.60
1.30

Y
1.66
1.67
1.67
1.67
1.63
1.95
1.69

The dangerous activities like holding

the electric sockets or moving towards the water
pool or moving towards the bulky materials etc are
avoided by sending the message to the childs
parents by using the android application developed.
android application developed can also plot the pie
chart which indicates all activities of the child and
that pie chart is sent as a message to the parents.
Similar pie chart is shown in the below figure.

Figure 7: pie chart of the child activity

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ANUSHA ET AL.: CHILD ACTIVITY RECOGNITION USING ACCELEROMETERS

Advantages and Limitation of the System

REFERENCES

It is helpful for the disabled children,

this system provides security to the children,
immediate precaution can be taken which avoids
the accidents occur at home. Remote parental care
is possible and reliability is high. Limitation of the
system is that since it is a wearable child may get
irritated to wear all the time, and its initial cost is
high.

Foerster F., Smeja M., and Fahrenberg J. (1999,

Sep.). Detection of posture and motion by
accelerometry: A validation study in
ambulatory monitoring. Comput. Human
Behav., [Online].

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE SCOPE

This paper presented the activity
recognition method for child using triaxial
accelerometer and a sensor. Time-domain and
frequency domain features are extracted for
categorizing body postures such as standing still,
walking, toddling, wiggling, crawling, rolling,
sitting down and twiddling as well as locomotion.
Multiple feature sets are compared to find an
optimized classification method, and showed how
well they performed on a body. The average overall
accuracy is 90% with acceptable computational
complexity using only a wearable triaxial
accelerometer sensor. This proposed system is
mainly used for the hospitals to monitor abnormal
patients activities, whose information is updated to
the doctors android mobiles which is helpful for the
remote medication. In the future days these wired
wearable device can be replaced by wireless
system. Many accelerometers can be replaced by a
single accelerometer to sense activities

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