Automatic caloric expenditure estimation with smartphone's built-in sensors

Abstract

Fitness-tracking systems are technologies commonly used to enhance peoples' lifestyles. Feedback, usability, and ease of acquisition are fundamental to achieving the good physical condition goal. Users need constant motivation as a way to keep their interest in the fitness system and consequently, continue on a healthy lifestyle track.

However, although feedback is increasingly being incorporated in many fitness-tracking systems, usability and ease of acquisition are remaining shortcomings that need to be enhanced. Features such as automatic activity identification, low-energy consumption, simplicity and goals-achieved notifications provide a good user experience. Nevertheless, most of these functions require the acquisition of a relatively expensive fitness-tracking device.

Smartphones provide a partial solution by allowing users an easy access to multiple fitness applications, which reduce the need for purchasing another gadget. Nonetheless, improvements in the user experience are still necessary. In the other hand, wearables devices satisfy the usability, however, the cost of their acquisition represents an impediment to some users.

The system proposed in this research aims to handle these issues and offers a solution by combining the benefits from mobile applications such as feedback and ease of acquisition, with the usability that wearable devices provide, into a smartphone Android application. Data collected from a single user while performing a series of common daily activities namely walking, jogging, cycling, climbing stairs, and walking downstairs, was used to classify and provide an automatic identification of these activities with an overall accuracy of 91%, and identifying the stairs activities with an accuracy of 81%. Finally, the caloric expenditure, which we considered the most important metric for motivating a user to perform a physical activity, was estimated by following the oxygen consumption equations from the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM).