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Nearly 1.35 million people are killed in automobile accidents every year, and nearly half of all individuals involved in these accidents were not wearing their seatbelt at the time of the crash. This lack of safety precaution occurs in spite of the numerous safety sensors and warning indicators embedded within modern vehicles. This presents a clear need for more effective methods of encouraging consistent seatbelt use. To that end, this work leverages wearable technology and activity recognition techniques to detect when individuals have buckled their seatbelt. To develop such a system, we collected smartwatch data from 26 different users. From this data, we identified trends which inspired the development of novel features. Using these features, we trained models to identify the motion of fastening a seatbelt in real-time. This model serves as the basis for future work in which systems can provide personalized and effective interventions to ensure seatbelt use. 

Nearly half of people prescribed medication to treat chronic or short-term conditions do not take their medicine as prescribed. This leads to worse treatment outcomes, higher hospital admission rates, increased healthcare costs, and increased morbidity and mortality rates. While some instances of medication non-adherence are a result of problems with the treatment plan or barriers caused by the health care provider, many are instances caused by patient-related factors such as forgetting, running out of medication, and not understanding the required dosages. This presents a clear need for patient-centered systems that can reliably increase medication adherence. To that end, in this work we describe an activity recognition system capable of recognizing when individuals take medication in an unconstrained, real-world environment. Our methodology uses a modified version of the Bagging ensemble method to suit unbalanced data and a classifier trained on the prediction probabilities of the Bagging classifier to identify when individuals took medication during a full-day study. Using this methodology we are able to recognize when individuals took medication with an F-measure of 0.77. Our system is a first step towards developing personal health interfaces that are capable of providing personalized medication adherence interventions.