Reducing the Impact of Sensor Orientation Variability in Human Activity Recognition Using a Consistent Reference System

Sensor- orientation is a critical aspect in a Human Activity Recognition (HAR) system based on tri-axial signals (such as accelerations); different sensors orientations introduce important errors in the activity recognition process. This paper proposes a new preprocessing module to reduce the negative impact of sensor-orientation variability in HAR. Firstly, this module estimates a consistent reference system; then, the tri-axial signals recorded from sensors with different orientations are transformed into this consistent reference system. This new preprocessing has been evaluated to mitigate the effect of different sensor orientations on the classification accuracy in several state-of-the-art HAR systems. The experiments were carried out using a subject-wise cross-validation methodology over six different datasets, including movements and postures. This new preprocessing module provided robust HAR performance even when sudden sensor orientation changes were included during data collection in the six different datasets. As an example, for the WISDM dataset, sensors with different orientations provoked a significant reduction in the classification accuracy of the state-of-the-art system (from 91.57 ± 0.23% to 89.19 ± 0.26%). This important reduction was recovered with the proposed algorithm, increasing the accuracy to 91.46 ± 0.30%, i.e., the same result obtained when all sensors had the same orientation.