Activity classification using unsupervised domain transfer from body worn sensors

Abstract

Activity classification has become a vital feature of wearable health tracking devices. As innovation in this field grows, wearable devices worn on different parts of the body are emerging. To perform activity classification on a new body location, labeled data corresponding to the new locations are generally required, but this is expensive to acquire. In this work, we present an innovative method to leverage an existing activity classifier, trained on Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data from a reference body location (the source domain), in order to perform activity classification on a new body location (the target domain) in an unsupervised way, i.e. without the need for classification labels at the new location. Specifically, given an IMU embedding model trained to perform activity classification at the source domain, we train an embedding model to perform activity classification at the target domain by replicating the embeddings at the source domain. This is achieved using simultaneous IMU measurements at the source and target domains. The replicated embeddings at the target domain are used by a classification model that has previously been trained on the source domain to perform activity classification at the target domain. We have evaluated the proposed methods on three activity classification datasets PAMAP2, MHealth, and Opportunity, yielding high F1 scores of 67.19%, 70.40% and 68.34%, respectively when the source domain is the wrist and the target domain is the torso.