The Wearables Development Toolkit

Abstract

Although the last two decades have seen an increasing number of activity recognition applications with wearable devices, there is still a lack of tools specifically designed to support their development. The development of activity recognition algorithms for wearable devices is particularly challenging because of the several requirements that have to be met simultaneously (e.g., low energy consumption, small and lightweight, accurate recognition). Activity recognition applications are usually developed in a series of iterations to annotate sensor data and to analyze, develop and assess the performance of a recognition algorithm. This paper presents the Wearables Development Toolkit, an Integrated Development Environment designed to lower the entrance barrier to the development of activity recognition applications with wearables. It specifically focuses on activity recognition using on-body inertial sensors. The toolkit offers a repository of high-level reusable components and a set of tools with functionality to annotate data, to analyze and develop activity recognition algorithms and to assess their recognition and computational performance. We demonstrate the versatility of the toolkit with three applications and describe how we developed it incrementally based on two user studies.