Wearable Sensing for Physical Activity Measurement: Design and Performance Evaluation

In-situ monitoring of human physical activity under free-living conditions is key to establishing correlation between activity and health. This paper presents the design and performance evaluation of a multi-sensor integrated measurement system (IMS) for quantifying human physical activity. The IMS consists of two accelerometers, one UV sensor, and one respiration sensor to track and record body movement and the level of exertion of human body, to enable an objective assessment of the activities that human test subjects engage in during daily lives. Detailed analysis and simulations were performed leading up to a parametric design of the IMS unit. Experiments performed on human subjects in a clinical study have demonstrated that the multi-sensing system working in conjunction with a supervised learning algorithm is effective in recognizing activities types of varying intensity.