Abstract-Driven by the demands on healthcare resulting from the shift toward more sedentary lifestyles, considerable effort has been devoted to the monitoring and classification of human activity. In previous studies, various classification schemes and feature extraction methods have been used to identify different activities from a range of different datasets. In this paper, we present a comparison of 14 methods to extract classification features from accelerometer signals. These are based on the wavelet transform and other well-known time-and frequency-domain signal characteristics. To allow an objective comparison between the different features, we used two datasets of activities collected from 20 subjects. The first set comprised three commonly used activities, namely, level walking, stair ascent, and stair descent, and the second a total of eight activities. Furthermore, we compared the classification accuracy for each feature set across different combinations of three different accelerometer placements. The classification analysis has been performed with robust subject-based cross-validation methods using a nearest-neighbor classifier. The findings show that, although the wavelet transform approach can be used to characterize nonstationary signals, it does not perform as accurately as frequencybased features when classifying dynamic activities performed by healthy subjects. Overall, the best feature sets achieved over 95% intersubject classification accuracy.
Preece et al. REF addressed the area of dynamic activity recognition and the specific challenge of extracting relevant features from the accelerometer signal.
A Comparison of Feature Extraction Methods for the Classification of Dynamic Activities From Accelerometer Data
IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering
IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering
Computer Science Medicine