Ambient and Wearable Sensor Fusion for Activity Recognition in Healthcare Monitoring Systems

The use of wearable sensors for home monitoring provides an effective means of inferring a patient’s level of activity. However, wearable sensors have intrinsic ambiguities that prevent certain activities to be recognized accurately. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a robust framework for enhanced activity recognition by integrating an ear-worn activity recognition (e-AR) sensor with ambient blob-based vision sensors. Accelerometer information from the e-AR is fused with features extracted from the vision sensor by using a Gaussian Mixture Model Bayes classifier. The experimental results showed a significant improvement of the classification accuracy compared to the use of the e-AR sensor alone. Keywords— blob sensor, wearable sensor, sensor fusion, activity recognition