Human Activity Recognition of Children with Wearable Devices Using LightGBM Machine Learning

Human activity recognition (HAR) using machine learning (ML) methods is a relatively new method for collecting and analyzing large amounts of human behavioral data using special wearable sensors. Our main goal was to find a reliable method which could automatically detect various playful and daily routine activities in children. We defined 40 activities for ML recognition, and we collected activity motion data by means of wearable smartwatches with a special SensKid software. We analyzed the data of 34 children (19 girls, 15 boys; age range: 6.59 – 8.38; median age = 7.47). All children were typically developing first graders from three elementary schools. The activity recognition was a binary classification task which was evaluated with a Light Gradient Boosted Machine (LGBM)learning algorithm, a decision based method with a 3-fold cross validation. We used the sliding window technique during the signal processing, and we aimed at finding the best window size for the analysis of each behavior element to achieve the most effective settings. Seventeen activities out of 40 were successfully recognized with AUC values above 0.8. The window size had no significant effect. The overall accuracy was 0.95, which is at the top segment of the previously published similar HAR data. In summary, the LGBM is a very promising solution for HAR. In line with previous findings, our results provide a firm basis for a more precise and effective recognition system that can make human behavioral analysis faster and more objective.