Keep on Moving! Activity Monitoring and Stimulation Using Wireless Sensor Networks

Because health condition and quality of life are directly influenced by the amount and intensity of daily physical activity, monitoring the level of activity has gained interest in recent years for various medical and wellbeing applications. In this paper we describe our experience with implementing and evaluating physical activity monitoring and stimulation using wireless sensor networks and motion sensors. Our prototype provides feedback on the activity level of users using a simple colored light. We conduct experiments on multiple test subjects, performing multiple normal daily activities. The results from our experiments represent the motivation for and a first step towards robust complex physical activity monitoring with multiple sensors distributed over a person’s body. The results show that using a single sensor on the body is inadequate in certain situations. Results also indicate that feedback provided on a person’s activity level can stimulate the person to do more exercise. Using multiple sensor nodes and sensor modalities per subject would improve the activity estimation performance, provided that the sensor nodes are small and inconspicuous.