Background

Ever since their introduction in the late 2000s, smartphones have been changing the landscape of people’s daily lives. As these devices get more popular, they are also getting more powerful. Today, we can hold in our hand a device that is more powerful than a room full of computers in the 1960s. Not only this, smartphones today come with sensors like accelerometers, gyroscope, magnetometer, GPS, ambient light sensor and so on. Human activity recognition utilizes the increased computational power of smartphones and their diverse array of sensors to collect raw data from a subset of the phone sensors, use the computational power of the phone to detect motion patterns and recognize the activity that the user is engaged in.

Fitness monitoring trackers like fitbit and android watch have also steadily gained popularity worldwide. This reflects the increasing demand for ways to monitor fitness. Activity recognition also presents us with a marvelous prospect when it comes to fitness monitoring. Using techniques employed in activity recognition, not only will users be able to track the number of step taken, the number of calories spent, the number of stairs climbed, the number of hours slept, their quality of sleep and distance traveled but smartphones can also be used to alert idle users to move around if it notices that they have been sitting for too long. Since no extra sensors are required and they are accessed through the smartphone, these applications are zero cost and easy to use. Therefore, my motivation behind this project is to provide an affordable means of monitoring fitness through an Android device.

Software

The final product of my project will be an Android (possibly cross-platform) application that comes with a trained classification model (possibly based on decision trees) capable of classifying activities into separate classes based on the current input data stream from sensors like accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, etc. Furthermore, the application will also keep track of how many steps the user has taken, stairs climbed, hours slept, distance travelled and so on. I plan to build a suitable visualization within the application to allow the users to better understand the data.

Paper

My paper will contain a detailed description of the framework I used to build the application, as well as the techniques I used to extract features from training and test datasets. Also, in this paper, I will justify my choice of the machine learning algorithm used and the visualization techniques used. More importantly, I will evaluate the accuracy of the current model and suggest further ways to improve on it.