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Human activity recognition (HAR) is an important component in a number of health applications, including rehabilitation, Parkinson’s disease, daily activity monitoring, and fitness monitoring. State-of-the-art HAR approaches use multiple sensors on the body to accurately identify activities at runtime. These approaches typically assume that data from all sensors are available for runtime activity recognition. However, data from one or more sensors may be unavailable due to malfunction, energy constraints, or communication challenges between the sensors. Missing data can lead to significant degradation in the accuracy, thus affecting quality of service to users. A common approach for handling missing data is to train classifiers or sensor data recovery algorithms for each combination of missing sensors. However, this results in significant memory and energy overhead on resource-constrained wearable devices. In strong contrast to prior approaches, this paper presents a clustering-based approach (CIM) to impute missing data at runtime. We first define a set of possible clusters and representative data patterns for each sensor in HAR. Then, we create and store a mapping between clusters across sensors. At runtime, when data from a sensor are missing, we utilize the stored mapping table to obtain most likely cluster for the missing sensor. The representative window for the identified cluster is then used as imputation to perform activity classification. We also provide a method to obtain imputation-aware activity prediction sets to handle uncertainty in data when using imputation. Experiments on three HAR datasets show that CIM achieves accuracy within 10% of a baseline without missing data for one missing sensor when providing single activity labels. The accuracy gap drops to less than 1% with imputation-aware classification. Measurements on a low-power processor show that CIM achieves close to 100% energy savings compared to state-of-the-art generative approaches.

 

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurological disorder with complicated and disabling motor and non-motor symptoms. The complexity of PD pathology is amplified due to its dependency on patient diaries and the neurologist’s subjective assessment of clinical scales. A significant amount of recent research has explored new cost-effective and subjective assessment methods pertaining to PD symptoms to address this challenge. This article analyzes the application areas and use of mobile and wearable technology in PD research using the PRISMA methodology. Based on the published papers, we identify four significant fields of research: diagnosis, prognosis and monitoring, predicting response to treatment, and rehabilitation. Between January 2008 and December 2021, 31,718 articles were published in four databases: PubMed Central, Science Direct, IEEE Xplore, and MDPI. After removing unrelated articles, duplicate entries, non-English publications, and other articles that did not fulfill the selection criteria, we manually investigated 1559 articles in this review. Most of the articles (45%) were published during a recent four-year stretch (2018–2021), and 19% of the articles were published in 2021 alone. This trend reflects the research community’s growing interest in assessing PD with wearable devices, particularly in the last four years of the period under study. We conclude that there is a substantial and steady growth in the use of mobile technology in the PD contexts. We share our automated script and the detailed results with the public, making the review reproducible for future publications. 

Movement disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, affect more than 10 million people worldwide. Gait analysis is a critical step in the diagnosis and rehabilitation of these disorders. Specifically, step and stride lengths provide valuable insights into the gait quality and rehabilitation process. However, traditional approaches for estimating step length are not suitable for continuous daily monitoring since they rely on special mats and clinical environments. To address this limitation, this article presents a novel and practical step-length estimation technique using low-power wearable bend and inertial sensors. Experimental results show that the proposed model estimates step length with 5.49% mean absolute percentage error and provides accurate real-time feedback to the user. 

Human activity recognition (HAR) is growing in popularity due to its wide-ranging applications in patient rehabilitation and movement disorders. HAR approaches typically start with collecting sensor data for the activities under consideration and then develop algorithms using the dataset. As such, the success of algorithms for HAR depends on the availability and quality of datasets. Most of the existing work on HAR uses data from inertial sensors on wearable devices or smartphones to design HAR algorithms. However, inertial sensors exhibit high noise that makes it difficult to segment the data and classify the activities. Furthermore, existing approaches typically do not make their data available publicly, which makes it difficult or impossible to obtain comparisons of HAR approaches. To address these issues, we present wearable HAR (w-HAR) which contains labeled data of seven activities from 22 users. Our dataset’s unique aspect is the integration of data from inertial and wearable stretch sensors, thus providing two modalities of activity information. The wearable stretch sensor data allows us to create variable-length segment data and ensure that each segment contains a single activity. We also provide a HAR framework to use w-HAR to classify the activities. To this end, we first perform a design space exploration to choose a neural network architecture for activity classification. Then, we use two online learning algorithms to adapt the classifier to users whose data are not included at design time. Experiments on the w-HAR dataset show that our framework achieves 95% accuracy while the online learning algorithms improve the accuracy by as much as 40%. 

Mobile platforms must satisfy the contradictory requirements of fast response time and minimum energy consumption as a function of dynamically changing applications. To address this need, systems-on-chip (SoC) that are at the heart of these devices provide a variety of control knobs, such as the number of active cores and their voltage/frequency levels. Controlling these knobs optimally at runtime is challenging for two reasons. First, the large configuration space prohibits exhaustive solutions. Second, control policies designed offline are at best sub-optimal, since many potential new applications are unknown at design-time. We address these challenges by proposing an online imitation learning approach. Our key idea is to construct an offline policy and adapt it online to new applications to optimize a given metric (e.g., energy). The proposed methodology leverages the supervision enabled by power-performance models learned at runtime. We demonstrate its effectiveness on a commercial mobile platform with 16 diverse benchmarks. Our approach successfully adapts the control policy to an unknown application after executing less than 25% of its instructions. 

Wearable internet of things (IoT) devices can enable a variety of biomedical applications, such as gesture recognition, health monitoring, and human activity tracking. Size and weight constraints limit the battery capacity, which leads to frequent charging requirements and user dissatisfaction. Minimizing the energy consumption not only alleviates this problem, but also paves the way for self-powered devices that operate on harvested energy. This paper considers an energy-optimal gesture recognition application that runs on energy-harvesting devices. We first formulate an optimization problem for maximizing the number of recognized gestures when energy budget and accuracy constraints are given. Next, we derive an analytical energy model from the power consumption measurements using a wearable IoT device prototype. Then, we prove that maximizing the number of recognized gestures is equivalent to minimizing the duration of gesture recognition. Finally, we utilize this result to construct an optimization technique that maximizes the number of gestures recognized under the energy budget constraints while satisfying the recognition accuracy requirements. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that the proposed analytical model is valid for wearable IoT applications, and the optimization approach increases the number of recognized gestures by up to 2.4× compared to a manual optimization.