Recognition of human activities with wearable sensors

A novel approach for recognizing human activities with wearable sensors is investigated in this article. The key techniques of this approach include the generalized discriminant analysis (GDA) and the relevance vector machines (RVM). The feature vectors extracted from the measured signal are processed by GDA, with its dimension remarkably reduced from 350 to 12 while fully maintaining the most discriminative information. The reduced feature vectors are then classified by the RVM technique according to an extended multiclass model, which shows good convergence characteristic. Experimental results on the Wearable Action Recognition Dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves an encouraging recognition rate of 99.2%, true positive rate of 99.18% and false positive rate of 0.07%. Although in most cases, the support vector machines model has more than 70 support vectors, the number of relevance vectors related to different activities is always not more than 4, which implies a great simplicity in the classifier structure. Our approach is expected to have potential in real-time applications or solving problems with large-scale datasets, due to its perfect recognition performance, strong ability in feature reduction, and simple classifier structure.