Analysis of human body movement is an important research area, specially for health applications. In order to assess the quality of life of people with mobility problems like Parkinson’s disease o stroke patients, it is crucial to monitor and assess their daily life activities. The main goal of this work is the characterization of basic activities using a single triaxial accelerometer located at the waist. This paper presents a novel postural detection algorithm based in SVM methods which is able to detect and identify Walking, Stand, Sit, Lying, Sit to Stand, Stand to sit, Bending up/down, Lying from Sit and Sit from Lying transitions with a sensitivity of 97% and specificity of 84% with 2884 postures analyzed from 31 healthy volunteers. Parameters and models found have been tested in another dataset from Parkinson’s disease patients, achieving results of 98% of sensitivity and 78% of specificity in postural transitions. The proposed algorithm has been optimized to be easily implemented in real-time system for on-line monitoring applications.

Peer Reviewed