Method for daily-life movement classification of elderly people

Activity monitoring using accelerometers is of growing interest. Acceleration contains information about intensity and frequency of activities. An additional barometer provides information on altitude. This paper presents an evaluation of several features with respect to their suitability for recognizing resting, walking, cycling, going up- and downstairs. Two classifiers are proposed: one using a barometer and the other neglecting the barometer. The classifiers were trained with reference data from 25 older adults, which performed a predefined set of activities of daily living. Both classifiers correctly recognized 82.7% of resting and 83.8% of cycling. Using a barometer, classification rates of 87.3% for walk- ing, 82.9% for going stairs up and 77.4% for going stairs down were achieved. In contrast, neglecting the barometer re- sulted in 70.8% for normal walking, 79.7% for going stairs up and 71.8% for going stairs down.