Toward a Characterization of Human Activities using Smart Devices: A Micro/Macro Approach

The emergence of new connected devices has opened up new opportunities and allowed to imagine concepts that bring computer sciences and social sciences closer together. In particular, today's increasingly sophisticated miniature sensors allow to track and understand human activities and behavior with a great precision. Taking different approaches and perspectives, we use in this paper smartwatches and smartglasses to explore these behaviors and show that these objects, considered by many as gadgets, have an important role to play in understanding the lives of individuals. The main objective of this work is to introduce two new scales of activity detection, which lacks a formal and consistent definition in the literature. First, we propose a model that precisely detects and interprets movements made by a person wearing smart devices. Then, we use this model to show different interactions between those micro-activities and bigger chunks of behaviors we call macro-activities. Using a new concept based on 3D visualization, we finally show that combining those two scales and using a limited dataset, it is possible to distinguish between different individuals when they are performing very similar activities. The findings of this study lead the way to enhanced user profiling.