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The ubiquity of smartphones together with their ever-growing computing, networking, and sensing powers have been changing the landscape of people’s daily life. Among others, activity recoginition, which takes the raw sensor reading as inputs and predicts a user’s motion activity, has become an active research area in recent years. It is the core building block in many high-impact applications, ranging from health and fitness monitoring, personal biometric signature, urban computing, assistive technology, and elder-care, to indoor localization and navigation, etc. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the recent advances in activity recognition with smartphones’ sensors. We start with the basic concepts such as sensors, activity types, etc. We review the core data mining techniques behind the main stream activity recognition algorithms, analyze their major challenges, and introduce a variety of real applications enabled by activity recognition.


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Activity Recognition with Smartphone Sensors

Show Author's information Xing SuHanghang TongPing Ji( )
Computer Science Department, Graduate Center, the City University of New York, New York, NY 10016, USA.
Computer Science Department, City College, CUNY, New York, NY 10031, USA.
Computer Science Department, Graduate Center, the City University of New York, New York, NY 10016, USA.

Abstract

The ubiquity of smartphones together with their ever-growing computing, networking, and sensing powers have been changing the landscape of people’s daily life. Among others, activity recoginition, which takes the raw sensor reading as inputs and predicts a user’s motion activity, has become an active research area in recent years. It is the core building block in many high-impact applications, ranging from health and fitness monitoring, personal biometric signature, urban computing, assistive technology, and elder-care, to indoor localization and navigation, etc. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the recent advances in activity recognition with smartphones’ sensors. We start with the basic concepts such as sensors, activity types, etc. We review the core data mining techniques behind the main stream activity recognition algorithms, analyze their major challenges, and introduce a variety of real applications enabled by activity recognition.

Keywords: machine learning, activity recognition, mobile sensors, data mining, pattern recognition

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Publication history

Received: 01 April 2014
Revised: 15 April 2014
Accepted: 17 April 2014
Published: 18 June 2014
Issue date: June 2014

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© The author(s) 2014

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (Nos. IIS1017415 and CNS-0904901). Research was sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory and was accomplished under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-09-2-0053. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Army Research Laboratory or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation here on. Funding was provided by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Contract Number W911NF-11-C-0200 and W911NF-12-C-0028. The content of the information in this document does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation here on.

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