Unsupervised activity clustering to estimate energy expenditure with a single body sensor

Body sensor networks (BSNs) have provided the opportunity to monitor energy expenditure (EE) in daily life and with that information help reduce sedentary behavior and ultimately improve human health. Current approaches for EE estimation using BSNs require tedious annotation of activity types and multiple body sensor nodes during data collection and high accuracy activity classifiers during post processing. These drawbacks impede deploying this technology in daily life — the primary motivation of using BSNs to monitor EE. With the goal of achieving the highest EE estimation accuracy with the least invasiveness and data collection effort, this paper presents an unsupervised, single-node solution for data collection and activity clustering. Motivated by a previous finding that clusters of similar activities tend to have similar regression models for estimating EE, we apply unsupervised clustering to implicitly group activities with homogeneous features and generate specific regression models for each activity cluster without requiring manual annotation. The framework therefore does not require specific activity classification, hence eliminating activity type labels. With leave-one-subject-out cross-validation across 10 subjects, an RMSE of 0.96 kcal/min was achieved, which is comparable to the activity-specific model and improves upon a single regression model.