Walking speed estimation is an essential component of mobile apps in various fields such as fitness, transportation, navigation, and health-care. Most existing solutions are focused on specialized medical applications that utilize body-worn motion sensors. These approaches do not serve effectively the general use case of numerous apps where the user holding a smartphone tries to find his or her walking speed solely based on smartphone sensors. However, existing smartphone-based approaches fail to provide acceptable precision for walking speed estimation. This leads to a question: is it possible to achieve comparable speed estimation accuracy using a smartphone over wearable sensor based obtrusive solutions? We find the answer from advanced neural networks. In this paper, we present DeepWalking, the first deep learning- based walking speed estimation scheme for smartphone. A deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) is applied to automatically identify and extract the most effective features from the accelerometer and gyroscope data of smartphone and to train the network model for accurate speed estimation. Experiments are performed with 10 participants using a treadmill. The average root- mean-squared-error (RMSE) of estimated walking speed is 0.16m&#x002F;s which is comparable to the results obtained by state-of- the-art approaches based on a number of body- worn sensors (i.e., RMSE of 0.11m&#x002F;s). The results indicate that a smartphone can be a strong tool for walking speed estimation if the sensor data are effectively calibrated and supported by advanced deep learning techniques.
The majority of existing approaches for walking speed estimation are based on body-worn motion sensors ( mostly accelerometer and gyroscope sensors secured to body) @cite_4 @cite_5 @cite_7 @cite_15 @cite_13 @cite_18 . Mannini and Sabatini used foot mounted sensors @cite_19 ; McGinnis utilized wearable accelerometer arrays mounted on several parts of body like shank, sacrum, and thigh @cite_7 ; and Zihajehzadeh and Park exploited wrist-worn sensors for walking speed estimation @cite_14 . These approaches, however, do not serve effectively the general use case of numerous apps where the user holding a smartphone tries to find his or her walking speed solely based on smartphone sensors. Thus, a research question that we ask here is if it would be possible to achieve comparable precision of walking speed estimation using only the inertial sensors of smartphone, and what would be the methodologies to accomplish this goal.
@cite_18 @cite_14 @cite_4 @cite_7 @cite_19 @cite_5 @cite_15 @cite_13
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We studied the feasibility of estimating walking speed using a shank-mounted inertial measurement unit. Our approach took advantage of the inverted pendulum-like behavior of the stance leg during walking to identify a new method for dividing up walking into individual stride cycles and estimating the initial conditions for the direct integration of the accelerometer and gyroscope signals. To test its accuracy, we compared speed estimates to known values during walking overground and on a treadmill. The speed estimation method worked well across treadmill speeds and slopes yielding a root mean square speed estimation error of only 7 . It also worked well during overground walking with a 4 error in the estimated travel distance. This accuracy is comparable to that achieved from foot-mounted sensors, providing an alternative in sensor positioning for walking speed estimation. Shank mounted sensors may be of great benefit for estimating speed in walking with abnormal foot motion and for the embedded control of knee-mounted devices such as prostheses and energy harvesters. Walking speed is widely used to study human health status. Wearable inertial measurement units (IMU) are promising tools for the ambulatory measurement of walking speed. Among wearable inertial sensors, the ones worn on the wrist, such as a watch or band, have relatively higher potential to be easily incorporated into daily lifestyle. Using the arm swing motion in walking, this paper proposes a regression model-based method for longitudinal walking speed estimation using a wrist-worn IMU. A novel kinematic variable is proposed, which finds the wrist acceleration in the principal axis (i.e. the direction of the arm swing). This variable (called pca-acc) is obtained by applying sensor fusion on IMU data to find the orientation followed by the use of principal component analysis. An experimental evaluation was performed on 15 healthy young subjects during free walking trials. The experimental results show that the use of the proposed pca-acc variable can significantly improve the walking speed estimation accuracy when compared to the use of raw acceleration information (p<0.01). When Gaussian process regression is used, the resulting walking speed estimation accuracy and precision is about 5.9 and 4.7 , respectively. This study aims at estimating the human walking speed using wearable accelerometers by proposing a novel virtual inverted pendulum model. This model not only keeps the important characteristic in biped rolling-foot model, but also makes the speed estimation feasible using human body acceleration. Rather than the statistical methods, the proposed kinematic walking model enables calibration of the parameters during walking using only one tri-axial accelerometer on waist that reflects the user's inertia information during walking. In addition, this model also includes the effect of rotation of waist within a walking cycle that improves the estimation accuracy. Experimental results on a group of humans show a 1.22 error mean and 2.78 deviation, which is far better than other known studies. Background: Over the past few years, the world has witnessed an unprecedented growth in smartphone use. With sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes on board, smartphones have the potential to enhance our understanding of health behavior, in particular physical activity or the lack thereof. However, reliable and valid activity measurement using only a smartphone in situ has not been realized. Objective: To examine the validity of the iPod Touch (Apple, Inc.) and particularly to understand the value of using gyroscopes for classifying types of physical activity, with the goal of creating a measurement and feedback system that easily integrates into individuals’ daily living. Methods: We collected accelerometer and gyroscope data for 16 participants on 13 activities with an iPod Touch, a device that has essentially the same sensors and computing platform as an iPhone. The 13 activities were sitting, walking, jogging, and going upstairs and downstairs at different paces. We extracted time and frequency features, including mean and variance of acceleration and gyroscope on each axis, vector magnitude of acceleration, and fast Fourier transform magnitude for each axis of acceleration. Different classifiers were compared using the Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) toolkit, including C4.5 (J48) decision tree, multilayer perception, naive Bayes, logistic, k-nearest neighbor (kNN), and meta-algorithms such as boosting and bagging. The 10-fold cross-validation protocol was used. Results: Overall, the kNN classifier achieved the best accuracies: 52.3 –79.4 for up and down stair walking, 91.7 for jogging, 90.1 –94.1 for walking on a level ground, and 100 for sitting. A 2-second sliding window size with a 1-second overlap worked the best. Adding gyroscope measurements proved to be more beneficial than relying solely on accelerometer readings for all activities (with improvement ranging from 3.1 to 13.4 ). Conclusions: Common categories of physical activity and sedentary behavior (walking, jogging, and sitting) can be recognized with high accuracies using both the accelerometer and gyroscope onboard the iPod touch or iPhone. This suggests the potential of developing just-in-time classification and feedback tools on smartphones. [J Med Internet Res 2012;14(5):e130]