Opportunistic hierarchical classification for power optimization in wearable movement monitoring systems

Patient monitoring systems are becoming increasingly important in accurately diagnosing and treating growing worldwide chronic conditions especially the obesity epidemic. The ubiquitous nature of wearable sensors, such as the readily available embedded accelerometers in smart phones, provides physicians with an opportunity to remotely monitor their patient´s daily activity. There have been several developments in the area of activity recognition using wearable sensors. However, due to power constraints, resource efficient algorithms are necessary in order to perform accurate realtime activity recognition while consuming minimal energy. In this paper, we present a two-tier architecture for optimizing power consumption in such systems. While the first tier relies on a hierarchical classification approach, the second one manages the activation and deactivation of the classification system. We demonstrate this using a series of binary Support Vector Machine classifiers. The proposed approach, however, is classifier independent. Experimenting with subjects performing different daily activities such as walking, going upstairs and down-stairs, standing and sitting, our approach achieves a power savings of 87%, while maintaining 92% classification accuracy.