Field Test of Automated Activity Classification Using Acceleration Signals from a Wristband

Worker's awkward postures and unreasonable physical load can be corrected by monitoring construction activities, thereby increasing the safety and productivity of construction workers and projects. However, manual identification is time-consuming and contains high human variance. In this regard, an automated activity recognition system based on inertial measurement unit can help in rapidly and precisely collecting motion data. With the acceleration data, the machine learning algorithm will be used to train classifiers for automatically categorizing activities. However, input acceleration data are extracted either from designed experiments or simple construction work in previous studies. Thus, collected data series are discontinuous and activity categories are insufficient for real construction circumstances. This study aims to collect acceleration data during long-term continuous work in a construction project and validate the feasibility of activity recognition algorithm with the continuous motion data. The data collection covers two different workers performing formwork at the same site. An accelerator, as well as portable camera, is attached to the worker during the entire working session for simultaneously recording motion data and working activity. The supervised machine learning-based models are trained to classify activity in hierarchical levels, which reaches a 96.9% testing accuracy of recognizing rest and work and 85.6% testing accuracy of identifying stationary, traveling, and rebar installation actions.