Enhancing accelerometer-based activity recognition with capacitive proximity sensing

Activity recognition with a wearable accelerometer is a common investigated research topic and enables the detection of basic activities like sitting, walking or standing. Recent work in this area adds different sensing modalities to the inertial data to collect more information of the user's environment to boost activity recognition for more challenging activities. This work presents a sensor prototype consisting of an accelerometer and a capacitive proximity sensor that senses the user's activities based on the combined sensor values. We show that our proposed approach of combining both modalities significantly improves the recognition rate for detecting activities of daily living.