Introducing a modular activity monitoring system

In this paper, the idea of a modular activity monitoring system is introduced. By using different combinations of the system´s three modules, different functionality becomes available: 1) a coarse intensity estimation of physical activities 2) different features based on HR-data and 3) the recognition of basic activities and postures. 3D-accelerometers - placed on lower arm, chest and foot - and a heart rate monitor were used as sensors. A dataset with 8 subjects and 14 different activities was recorded to evaluate the performance of the system. The overall performance on the intensity estimation task, relying on the chest-worn accelerometer and the HR-monitor, was 94.37%. The overall performance on the activity recognition task, using all three accelerometer placements and the HR-monitor, was 90.65%. This paper also gives an analysis of the importance of different accelerometer placements and the importance of a HR-monitor for both tasks.