Benefits of Dynamically Reconfigurable Activity Recognition in Distributed Sensing Environments

The automatic detection of complex human activities in daily life using distributed ambient and on-body sensors is still an open research challenge. A key issue is to construct scalable systems that can capture the large diversity and variety of human activities. Dynamic system reconfiguration is a possible solution to adaptively focus on the current scene and thus reduce recognition complexity. In this work, we evaluate potential energy savings and performance gains of dynamic reconfiguration in a case study using 28 sensors recording 78 activities performed within four settings. Our results show that reconfiguration improves recognition performance by up to 11.48 %, while reducing energy consumption when turning off unneeded sensors by 74.8 %. The granularity of reconfiguration trades off recognition performance for energy savings.