Sensor-activity relevance in human activity recognition with wearable motion sensors and mutual information criterion

Selecting a suitable sensor configuration is an important aspect of recognizing human activities with wearable motion sensors. This problem encompasses selecting the number and type of the sensors, configuring them on the human body, and identifying the most informative sensor axes. In earlier work, researchers have used customized sensor configurations and compared their activity recognition rates with those of others. However, the results of these comparisons are dependent on the feature sets and the classifiers employed. In this study, we propose a novel approach that utilizes the time-domain distributions of the raw sensor measurements. We determine the most informative sensor types (among accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers), sensor locations (among torso, arms, and legs), and measurement axes (among three perpendicular coordinate axes at each sensor) based on the mutual information criterion.