SenseCollect: We Need Efficient Ways to Collect On-body Sensor-based Human Activity Data!

On-body sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) lags behind other fields because it lacks large-scale, labeled datasets; this shortfall impedes progress in developing robust and generalized predictive models. To facilitate researchers in collecting more extensive datasets quickly and efficiently we developed SenseCollect. We did a survey and interviewed student researchers in this area to identify what barriers are making it difficult to collect on-body sensor-based HAR data from human subjects. Every interviewee identified data collection as the hardest part of their research, stating it was laborious, consuming and error-prone. To improve HAR data resources we need to address that barrier, but we need a better understanding of the complicating factors to overcome it. To that end we conducted a series of control variable experiments that tested several protocols to ascertain their impact on data collection. SenseCollect studied 240+ human subjects in total and presented the findings to develop a data collection guideline. We also implemented a system to collect data, created the two largest on-body sensor-based human activity datasets, and made them publicly available.