Context Awareness Activity Recognition: Project

Activity recognition combines hard sensing and soft sensing inputs to a computer to determine what an individual is doing. Hard sensing inputs include:

• Accelerometers (measuring relative motion)
• Location sensing
• Ambient light
• Ambient audio

Soft sensing inputs include:

• Device activity
• Social networking actions
• Calendar data

The goal of this research is to use these elements to intelligently guide, instruct, encourage, inform, and otherwise support each user’s activities in a personalized way. The computer becomes more of an intelligent assistant to your everyday activities.

Practical applications of this form of context-aware computing include determining a person’s level of physical activity to help physicians treat lifestyle-dependent diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease. Individuals usually don’t accurately report, for example, the amount of exercise they get each week. With tracking and guidance provided by a mobile computer, both the physician and the patient have real data and analytical tools to more realistically assess goals and monitor health improvements.

Going beyond physical activity to higher-level semantics of activities can help improve everyday communication or enable introspection. Imagine grabbing your phone and, before dialing your wife, you see that she is in a meeting. How would that change your behavior? Or, imagine being able to look at a summary of how you spent your time over the last year—in the same way you do today with your financial information. What would this type of analysis reveal? These examples suggest the ways these kinds of capabilities can be used to bring new experiences to users.

Activity recognition can be combined with other elements, such as gesture recognition, social proximity, and emotional classifiers to develop a wide range of highly personalized applications. Intel Labs is actively working in all these areas to advance context-aware computing and provide a platform for innovation.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/research/intel-labs-context-awareness-activity-recognition.html