Accelerometer - Movement pattern recognition (iphone)

AI Thread Summary
The discussion focuses on recognizing physical movements using an iPhone's accelerometer, particularly for urban street behavior related to traffic lights. The goal is to differentiate actions like walking, stopping, turning, and sitting, with a specific interest in detecting when a pedestrian stops at a red light and crosses on green. A heuristic approach is proposed, utilizing FFT on the gravity direction signal for walking and measuring energy levels to determine stopping. However, challenges arise in distinguishing between activities like stair climbing and walking, and the limitations of not having a gyroscope for turning detection are noted. The thread highlights the need for clarity on the gravity direction signal from a 3-axis accelerometer for effective analysis.
reesefrancis
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Hi, I have to find the best approach for tackling a problem for trying to recognize physical movements - with an iPhone in a pocket - like walking, stopping, turning left/right, sitting.

The ultimate goal is to recognize urban street behaviour, mostly regarding traffic lights: is it possible to tell when a pedestrian stops at a red light and then goes across the road on a green light? Or the data from an accelerometer won't be different when walking in a park etc.

I was thinking on just heuristically find the data corresponding to each action, then to check the incoming values against this data (with a threshold) and see what's happening. That's a very rough approach, of course, but unfortunately I don't have time to set up Support Vector Machine method for recognizing my patterns.

Here's what I got:
Walking: Do an fft on the gravity direction signal. Measure its frequency response for walking at different speeds and then set a simple threshold.

Stopping: if the average power i.e. total energy in the signal over the last few seconds drops below a certain threshold then you can say the user has stopped.

Turning left/right: not possible without a gyroscope.

Sitting: with no idea here - except for collecting data when sitting up from standing up and viceversa.

Stair climbing: basically the data I get when I climb stairs isn't different from the one I get when walking. Or is it there some way to tell the difference?
 
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Is this the wrong section? hope not
 
I'll try with more specific questions:

which is the gravity direction signal of 3-axis accelerometer? I need to do an fft on it
 
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