Adaptive Activity and Context Recognition Using Multimodal Sensors in Smart Devices

The continuous development of new technologies has led to the creation of a wide range of personal devices embedded with an ever increasing number of miniature sensors. With accelerometers and technologies such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, today’s smartphones have the potential to monitor and record a complete history of their owners’ movements as well as the context in which they occur. In this article, we focus on four complementary aspects related to the understanding of human behaviour. First, the use of smartwatches in combination with smartphones in order to detect different activities and associated physiological patterns. Next, the use of a scalable and energy-efficient data structure that can represent the detected signal shapes. Then, the use of a supervised classifier (i.e. Support Vector Machine) in parallel with a quantitative survey involving a dozen participants to achieve a deeper understanding of the influence of each collected metric and its use in detecting user activities and contexts. Finally, the use of novel representations to visualize the activities and social interactions of all the users, allowing the creation of quick and easy-to-understand comparisons. The tools used in this article are freely available online under a MIT licence.