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Body Sensor Networks for Activity and Gesture Recognition

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The Art of Wireless Sensor Networks

Part of the book series: Signals and Communication Technology ((SCT))

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Abstract

The last decade has witnessed a rapid surge of interest in new sensing and monitoring devices for health care applications. An important development in this area is that of Body Sensor Networks (BSN) that operate in a pervasive manner for on-body applications. Intelligent processing of the sensor streams from BSN is key to the success of applications that rely on this framework. In this chapter we dwell upon one application of BSN that involved processing of wearable accelerometer data for recognizing ambulatory or simple activities and activity gestures. We elaborate on the different steps such as feature extraction and classification involved in the processing of raw sensor data for detecting activities and gestures. We also discuss various aspects associated with a real-time simple activity recognition system such as computational complexity and factors that emerge considering that the sensors are worn by humans. While some of these factors are common to wireless sensor networks in general, the discussion of the chapter is focused on the BSN system developed by us for recognizing simple activities and activity gestures.

N. C. Krishnan conducted the work presented in this chapter while he was a PhD student at Arizona State University.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Colin Juillard, Dirk Colbry, Ashok Venkatesan, and Rita Chattopadhyay for the assistance they rendered in designing the real-time system and for collecting activity data from different subjects. They also would like to thank Stephen Intille for sharing the accelerometer-based activity data collected by his group which was used to conduct some of the experiments in this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, 99163, USA

    Narayanan C. Krishnan

  2. Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Sethuraman Panchanathan

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  1. Narayanan C. Krishnan
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  2. Sethuraman Panchanathan
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Correspondence to Narayanan C. Krishnan .

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  1. College of Engineering and Computer Science, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Michigan-Dearborn, Dearborn, Michigan, USA

    Habib M. Ammari

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C. Krishnan, N., Panchanathan, S. (2014). Body Sensor Networks for Activity and Gesture Recognition. In: Ammari, H. (eds) The Art of Wireless Sensor Networks. Signals and Communication Technology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40066-7_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40066-7_15

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