Smartwatch-based sitting detection with human activity recognition for office workers syndrome

Abstract

© 2018 IEEE. The main cause of Office Workers Syndrome (OWS) is habitual unhealthy behavior. One such example is the habit of siting for long periods at a computer. It has recently become simple to study this kind of human activity by using smartwatch sensors, and as a result, HAR (human activity recognition) has become a field attracting considerable interest. Smartwatch accelerometers have been especially useful in HAR, while gyroscopes are also helpful, especially when combined with the accelerometer. This study therefore suggests the use of HAR to detect sitting in order to identify the threat of OWS through the use of data from the accelerometer and gyroscope in a smartwatch. Two ensemble learning approaches have therefore been examined in order to establish their capability in recognizing periods of sitting. The results reveal that the accelerometer and gyroscope are complementary in their application and using them in combination thus improves the accuracy of recognition. The ensemble learning-based techniques were able to achieve an accuracy level of 93.57% for activity recognition when detecting sitting.