Context-Aware Winter Sports Based on Multivariate Sequence Learning

In this paper, we present an intelligent system that is capable of estimating the status of a player engaging in winter activities based on the sequence analysis of multivariate time-series sensor signals. Among the winter activities, this paper mainly focuses on downhill winter sports such as alpine skiing and snowboarding. Assuming that the mechanical vibrations generated by physical interaction between the ground surface and ski/snowboard in motion can describe the ground conditions and playing contexts, we utilize inertial and vibration signals to categorize the motion context. For example, the proposed system estimates whether the player is sitting on a ski lift or standing on the escalator, or skiing on wet or snowy ground, etc. To measure the movement of a player during a game or on the move, we develop a custom embedded system comprising a motion sensor and piezo transducer. The captured multivariate sequence signals are then trained in a supervised fashion. We adopt artificial neural network approaches (e.g., 1D convolutional neural network, and gated recurrent neural networks, such as long short-term memory and gated recurrent units). The experimental results validate the feasibility of the proposed approach.