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Tracking activities holds great potential to improve the well-being of older adults, yet the accuracy of activity trackers for this demographic remains in question. Evaluating this accuracy requires ground-truth data directly from older adults, which has largely been gathered in controlled laboratory settings or labeled by researchers. Moreover, considering the diversity in older adults' activity engagement and tracking preferences, personalized activity tracking appears necessary. We demonstrate that older adults can benefit from personalized activity trackers by showing that cadence thresholds for stepping intensities vary within this group. However, collecting ground-truth data from older adults in real-world settings poses unique challenges. This paper examines two sources of ground-truth labels for the smartwatch Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data collected with older adults. Using verbal self-reports and a thigh-worn activity tracker, we assess their viability as ground-truth sources in natural settings. Additionally, we evaluate the costs and benefits of triangulating these sources as a ground-truth proxy. Our findings reveal two main costs: data shrinkage and notable effort from both contributors and data stewards. Simultaneously, we observe improved data quality and a greater ability to identify error sources when evaluating a trained model.
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MyMove: Facilitating Older Adults to Collect In-Situ Activity Labels on a Smartwatch with Speech
Current activity tracking technologies are largely trained on younger adults’ data, which can lead to solutions that are not well-suited for older adults. To build activity trackers for older adults, it is crucial to collect training data with them. To this end, we examine the feasibility and challenges with older adults in collecting activity labels by leveraging speech. Specifically, we built MyMove, a speech-based smartwatch app to facilitate the in-situ labeling with a low capture burden. We conducted a 7-day deployment study, where 13 older adults collected their activity labels and smartwatch sensor data, while wearing a thigh-worn activity monitor. Participants were highly engaged, capturing 1,224 verbal reports in total. We extracted 1,885 activities with corresponding effort level and timespan, and examined the usefulness of these reports as activity labels. We discuss the implications of our approach and the collected dataset in supporting older adults through personalized activity tracking technologies.
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- PAR ID:
- 10356480
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 21
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Self-tracking using commodity wearables such as smartwatches can help older adults reduce sedentary behaviors and engage in physical activity. However, activity recognition applications that are typically deployed in these wearables tend to be trained on datasets that best represent younger adults. We explore how our activity recognition model, a hybrid of long short-term memory and convolutional layers, pre-trained on smartwatch data from younger adults, performs on older adult data. We report results on week-long data from two older adults collected in a preliminary study in the wild with ground-truth annotations based on activPAL, a thigh-worn sensor. We find that activity recognition for older adults remains challenging even when comparing our model’s performance to state of the art deployed models such as the Google Activity Recognition API. More so, we show that models trained on younger adults tend to perform worse on older adults.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517457
