Automatic Segmentation and Recognition in Body Sensor Networks Using a Hidden Markov Model

One important application of body sensor networks is action recognition. Action recognition often implicitly requires partitioning sensor data into intervals, then labeling the partitions according to the action that each represents or as a non-action. The temporal partitioning stage is called segmentation, and the labeling is called classification. While many effective methods exist for classification, segmentation remains problematic. We present a technique inspired by continuous speech recognition that combines segmentation and classification using hidden Markov models. This technique is distributed across several sensor nodes. We show the results of this technique and the bandwidth savings over full data transmission.