Unsupervised posture detection by smartphone accelerometer

Proposed is a light-weight unsupervised decision tree based classification method to detect the user's postural actions, such as sitting, standing, walking and running as user states by analysing the data from a smartphone accelerometer sensor. The proposed method differs from other approaches by applying a sufficient number of signal processing features to exploit the sensory data without knowing any a priori information. Experiments show that the proposed method still makes a solid differentiation in user states (e.g. an above 90% overall accuracy) even when the sensor is operated under slower sampling frequencies. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2013.