2020 Volume E103.B Issue 6 Pages 662-668
This paper presents a real-time body motion classification system using the radio channel characteristics of a wearable body area network (BAN). We developed a custom wearable BAN radio channel measurement system by modifying an off-the-shelf ZigBee-based sensor network system, where the link quality indicator (LQI) values of the wireless links between the coordinator and four sensor nodes can be measured. After interpolating and standardizing the raw data samples in a pre-processing stage, the time-domain features are calculated, and the body motion is classified by a decision-tree based random forest machine learning algorithm which is most suitable for real-time processing. The features were carefully chosen to exclude those that exhibit the same tendency based on the mean and variance of the features to avoid overfitting. The measurements demonstrated successful real-time body motion classification and revealed the potential for practical use in various daily-life applications.