Enabling Efficient Time Series Analysis for Wearable Activity Data

Kristof Van Laerhoven, Eugen Berlin, Bernt Schiele

Abstract: Long-term activity recognition relies on wearable sensors that log the physical actions of the wearer, so that these can be analyzed afterwards. Recent progress in this field has made it feasible to log high-resolution inertial data, resulting in increasingly large data sets. We propose the use of piecewise linear approximation techniques to facilitate this analysis. This paper presents a modified version of SWAB to approximate human inertial data as efficiently as possible, together with a matching algorithm to query for similar subsequences in large activity logs. We show that our proposed algorithms are faster on human acceleration streams than the traditional ones while being comparable in accuracy to spot similar actions, benefitting post-analysis of human activity data.