Activity Classification Using Smartphone Gyroscope and Accelerometer Data

Activities, such as walking and sitting, are commonly used in biomedical settings either as an outcome or covariate of interest. Researchers have traditionally relied on surveys to quantify activity levels of subjects in both research and clinical settings, but surveys are not objective in nature and have many known limitations, such as recall bias. Smartphones provide an opportunity for unobtrusive objective measurement of various activities in naturalistic settings, but their data tends to be noisy and needs to be analyzed with care. We explored the potential of smartphone accelerometer and gyroscope data to distinguish between five different types of activity: walking, sitting, standing, ascending stairs, and descending stairs. We conducted a study in which four participants followed a study protocol and performed a sequence of various activities with one phone in their front pocket and another phone in their back pocket. The subjects were filmed throughout, and the obtained footage was annotated to establish ground truth activity. We applied the so-called movelet method to classify their activity. Our results demonstrate the promise of smartphones for activity detection in naturalistic settings, but they also highlight common challenges in this field of research.