Towards novel smart wearable sensors to classify subject-specific human walking activities

Abstract

In this century, smart devices are increasingly present in our lives, such as at work, sports, or household chores. In this context, we have wearable devices that can help people with health monitoring or physical performance in sports activities. With the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), these wearable devices can identify injuries in athletes or care for the elderly in rehabilitation from human activity recognition (HAR). AI techniques are commonly applied for pattern recognition, such as image classification or HAR. In this context, we seek to develop a smart wearable device to recognize walking activities. In order to improve the identification of these tasks through AI algorithms, we propose the fusion of data between four sensors called SPUs. Each SPU has NodeMCU ESP-32 and BNO080 IMU hardware in its architecture. The data from these hardware provides information in high precision. A zero W raspberry pi collected this information. After extracting and manipulating this data, we trained a deep learning model. The model accuracy was higher than 92% reaching an overall accuracy of 97%. Therefore, the smart wearable device showed a new tool for recognizing walking activity, which could be applied in the future to recognize more complex tasks.