Activity Recognition using Singular Value Decomposition

A wearable device that accurately records a user's daily activities is of substantial value. It can be used to enhance medical monitoring by maintaining a diary that lists what a person was doing and for how long. The design of a wearable system to record context such as activity recognition is influenced by a combination of variables. A flexible yet systematic approach for building a software classification environment according to a set of variables is described. The integral part of the software design is the use of a unique robust classifier that uses principal component analysis (PCA) through singular value decomposition (SVD) to perform real-time activity recognition. The thesis describes the different facets of the SVD-based approach and how the classifier inputs can be modified to better differentiate between activities. This thesis presents the design and implementation of a classification environment used to perform activity detection for a wearable e-textile system.