Background: The human activity monitoring technology is one of the most important\ntechnologies for ambient assisted living, surveillance-based security, sport and\nfitness activities, healthcare of elderly people. The activity monitoring is performed in\ntwo steps: the acquisition of body signals and the classification of activities being performed.\nThis paper presents a low-cost wearable wireless system specifically designed\nto acquire surface electromyography (sEMG) and accelerometer signals for monitoring\nthe human activity when performing sport and fitness activities, as well as in healthcare\napplications.\nResults: The proposed system consists of several ultralight wireless sensing nodes that\nare able to acquire, process and efficiently transmit the motion-related (biological and\naccelerometer) body signals to one or more base stations through a 2.4 GHz radio link\nusing an ad-hoc communication protocol designed on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 physical\nlayer. A user interface software for viewing, recording, and analysing the data was\nimplemented on a control personal computer that is connected through a USB link to\nthe base stations. To demonstrate the capability of the system of detecting the userâ??s\nactivity, data recorded from a few subjects were used to train and test an automatic\nclassifier for recognizing the type of exercise being performed. The system was tested\non four different exercises performed by three people, the automatic classifier achieved\nan overall accuracy of 85.7% combining the features extracted from acceleration and\nsEMG signals.\nConclusions: A low cost wireless system for the acquisition of sEMG and accelerometer\nsignals has been presented for healthcare and fitness applications. The system\nconsists of wearable sensing nodes that wirelessly transmit the biological and accelerometer\nsignals to one or more base stations. The signals so acquired will be combined\nand processed in order to detect, monitor and recognize human activities.
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