Zing Forum

Reading

ML4QS: A Daily Activity Recognition System Based on Wrist Sensor Data

ML4QS is a complete wrist sensor data pipeline project that uses Phyphox to collect accelerometer and gyroscope data, and identifies five daily activities (smoking, typing, idling, cooking, and exercising) via machine learning classifiers.

量化自我活动识别传感器数据机器学习时间序列特征工程加速度计陀螺仪Phyphox可穿戴设备
Published 2026-06-05 19:15Recent activity 2026-06-05 19:23Estimated read 6 min
ML4QS: A Daily Activity Recognition System Based on Wrist Sensor Data
1

Section 01

Introduction / Main Floor: ML4QS: A Daily Activity Recognition System Based on Wrist Sensor Data

ML4QS is a complete wrist sensor data pipeline project that uses Phyphox to collect accelerometer and gyroscope data, and identifies five daily activities (smoking, typing, idling, cooking, and exercising) via machine learning classifiers.

3

Section 03

Project Background and Objectives

The Quantified Self movement advocates using data tracking to understand personal behavior and health status. The ML4QS project explores a core question: Can we infer a person's current activity solely from wrist movement data?

This project uses a wrist-worn smartphone as the sensor platform, collects accelerometer, gyroscope, and linear accelerometer data via the Phyphox app, and builds a complete machine learning pipeline from data collection to activity classification.


4

Section 04

Activity Category Definitions

The project selected five representative daily activities, covering the behavioral spectrum from rest to intense exercise:

Smoking

Characterized by repeated hand-to-mouth movements, showing slow, periodic arc motions. This activity has a unique movement pattern that is distinctly different from typical hand activities.

Typing + Mouse Operation

Represents the desktop office scenario, characterized by fast, low-amplitude wrist vibrations mainly from keyboard typing and mouse movements.

Idle

A state of sitting and resting, with hands not participating in any activity, and the signal is close to the zero baseline. Used as a control group to evaluate the system's noise level.

Cooking

Includes actions like stirring, chopping vegetables, and fetching items, showing free-form arm movements with high variance. This activity has strong randomness, posing a challenge to the classifier.

Exercising

Brisk walking or jogging, characterized by strong periodic whole-body movements. The signal has large amplitude and obvious frequency characteristics.

5

Section 05

Data Collection Plan

  • Participants: 3 people (Alice, Bob, Charlie)
  • Sessions per activity per person: 8 sessions
  • Total sessions: 120
  • Recording duration per session: Approximately 30 seconds
  • Sampling rate: Approximately 500 Hz

This design ensures data diversity and statistical significance, while enhancing the model's generalization ability through multi-participant collection.


6

Section 06

Sensor Types

The project uses three types of sensors to fully capture the wrist's movement state:

Accelerometer

Measures linear motion and gravity components, providing information about the device's position and movement in space. The data includes three axes: acc_x, acc_y, acc_z.

Gyroscope

Measures rotational angular velocity, capturing the wrist's turning movements. The data includes three axes: gyr_x, gyr_y, gyr_z.

Linear Accelerometer

Measures pure motion acceleration after removing gravity, used to distinguish between static tilt caused by gravity and actual movement. The data includes three axes: lin_x, lin_y, lin_z.

7

Section 07

Windowing Strategy

To convert continuous time-series data into a format suitable for machine learning processing, the project uses a sliding window method:

  • Window size: 2 seconds
  • Step size: 1 second (50% overlap)
  • Number of windows per session: Approximately 29
  • Total number of windows: Approximately 3,480

The use of overlapping windows increases the number of training samples while maintaining temporal continuity.


8

Section 08

Feature Engineering

The project extracts rich time-domain and frequency-domain features from each window to fully characterize the statistical properties of movement: