Smartphone Based Multimodal Activity Detection System Using Plantar Pressure Sensors

There have been numerous efforts to detect human physical activities automatically. Healthcare professionals who want to monitor patients remotely, people who want to know their measure of physical activity objectively, or people who develop context-sensitive systems are interested in such systems. A majority of such systems use accelerometers to collect data from different parts of the body. Recently, some systems have used the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors of smart phones to develop unobtrusive systems. Such systems require users to carry smart phones with them. Such requirement limits the practical usability of these systems because people often place their phones on the table while sitting and women usually carry phones in their purses. We have developed a multimodal system where we used pressure sensor data from shoes along with accelerometers and gyroscope data from smart phones to make a more robust system. In this paper, we present our novel activity detection system along with evaluation briefly