ComTec at the UbiComp 2015 conference

In September 2015, Christoph Anderson presented an approach to improving activity recognition at the "2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing" (UbiComp 2015 for short).

This time, the conference was held in Osaka, Japan. A total of 861 scientists and users in the field of ubiquitous computing traveled to Osaka to exchange ideas, make contacts and present their results. This made this year's UbiComp the most attended UbiComp of all time.

The next UbiComp will take place in Heidelberg, Germany. We expect to be there and are already looking forward to seeing many familiar faces.

Reference: I. Suarez, A. Jahn, C. Anderson, and K. David, "Improved Activity Recognition by Using Enriched Acceleration Data," in Proc. of ACM Int. Conf. on Ubiquitous Computing, Osaka, Japan, 2015, pp. 1011-1015.

Abstract: Sensors embedded in smartphones are an essential component for activity recognition. Even though the accelerometer is the most widely used sensor, the highest recognition accuracies are obtained when using data collected from multiple sensors. However, the use of multiple sensors has an adverse impact on the energy consumption of power-limited devices such as smartphones. In this paper, we present a new method to improve the recognition accuracy of physical activities by using only the accelerometer. We utilize a low-pass filter to split the acceleration data into a low- and a high-frequency component. These components provide a new set of features, which can be used as a complement to the raw acceleration to reduce the number of sensors needed to recognize physical activities. After evaluating our method for a public dataset, we found that our approach represents an average of up to 16% increase in the recognition accuracy over the raw acceleration data, outperforming even widely used combinations such as the raw acceleration plus the gyroscope. The highest accuracies are obtained when using a cut-off frequency in the interval [0:001--0:05] Hz as well as a combination of the acceleration with its low-frequency component.