Fusion of smartphone sensor data for classification of daily user activities

New mobile applications need to estimate user activities by using sensor data provided by smart wearable devices and deliver context-aware solutions to users living in smart environments. We propose a novel hybrid data fusion method to estimate three types of daily user activities (being in a meeting, walking, and driving with a motorized vehicle) using the accelerometer and gyroscope data acquired from a smart watch using a mobile phone. The approach is based on the matrix time series method for feature fusion, and the modified Better-than-the-Best Fusion (BB-Fus) method with a stochastic gradient descent algorithm for construction of optimal decision trees for classification. For the estimation of user activities, we adopted a statistical pattern recognition approach and used the k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers. We acquired and used our own dataset of 354 min of data from 20 subjects for this study. We report a classification performance of 98.32 % for SVM and 97.42 % for kNN.