Activity-Based Person Identification Using Multimodal Wearable Sensor Data

Wearable devices equipped with a variety of sensors facilitate the measurement of physiological and behavioral characteristics. Activity-based person identification is considered an emerging and fast-evolving technology in security and access control fields. Wearables, such as smartphones, Apple Watch, and Google glass can continuously sense and collect activity-related information of users, and activity patterns can be extracted for differentiating different people. Although various human activities have been widely studied, few of them (gaits and keystrokes) have been used for person identification. In this article, we performed person identification using two public benchmark data sets (UCI-HAR and WISDM2019), which are collected from several different activities using multimodal sensors (accelerometer and gyroscope) embedded in wearable devices (smartphone and smartwatch). We implemented eight classifiers, including an multivariate squeeze-and-excitation network (MSENet), time series transformer (TST), temporal convolutional network (TCN), CNN-LSTM, ConvLSTM, XGBoost, decision tree, and k-nearest neighbor. The proposed MSENet can model the relationship between different sensor data. It achieved the best person identification accuracies under different activities of 91.31% and 97.79%, respectively, for the public data sets of UCI-HAR and WISDM2019. We also investigated the effects of sensor modality, human activity, feature fusion, and window size for sensor signal segmentation. Compared to the related work, our approach has achieved the state of the art.

Automated summary

Wearable devices with various sensors can measure physiological and behavioral characteristics. Activity-based person identification is a growing technology in security and access control. Smartphones, Apple Watch, and Google Glass can collect activity-related information for differentiating individuals. This article implemented eight classifiers, including MSENet, TST, TCN, CNN-LSTM, ConvLSTM, XGBoost, decision tree, and k-nearest neighbor, achieving high person identification accuracies on public datasets.