Detecting hand washing activity among activities of daily living and classification of WHO hand washing techniques using wearable devices and machine learning algorithms

During COVID‐19, awareness of proper hand washing has increased significantly. It is critical that people learn the correct hand washing techniques and adopt good hand washing habits. Hence, this study proposes using wearable devices to detect hand washing activity among other daily living activities (ADLs) and classify steps proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO). Two experiments were conducted with 16 participants, aged from 20 to 31. The first experiment was hand washing following WHO regulation (ten participants), and the second experiment was performing eight ADLs (eight participants). All participants wore two wearable devices equipped with accelerometers and gyroscopes; one on each wrist. Four machine learning classifiers were compared in classifying hand washing steps in the leave‐one‐subject‐out (LOSO) mode. The SVM model with Gaussian kernel achieved the best performance in classifying 11 washing hands steps, with an average F1‐score of 0.8501. When detected among the other ADLs, hand washing following WHO regulation obtained the F1‐score of 0.9871. The study demonstrates that wearable devices are feasible to detect hand washing activity and the hand washing techniques as well. The classification results of getting the soap and rubbing thumbs are low, which will be the main focus in the future study.