PhD Dissertation Defense by Meeralakshmi RADHAKRISHNAN | Gesture-based Profiling of Commonplace Lifestyle and Physical Activity Behaviors

About The Talk

The widespread availability of multitude of sensors on personal devices (e.g., smartphones, smartwatches) and other cheap, commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) IoT devices in the environment has opened up the opportunity for developing applications that are targeted at improving daily lifestyle of individuals. Moreover, there is a growing trend of leveraging ubiquitous computing technologies to improve physical health and well-being. Several of the lifestyle monitoring applications rely primarily on the capability of recognizing contextually relevant human movements, actions and gestures. As such, gesture recognition techniques, and gesture-based analytics have emerged as a fundamental component for realizing powerful, personalized and pervasive lifestyle applications. This thesis explores how such ubiquitously available sensing devices and the wealth of data sensed from such devices can be utilized for inferring fine-grained gestures. Subsequently, it explores how gestures can be used to profile user behavior during lifestyle activities and describes mechanisms to tackle various real-world challenges. Using two commonplace activities (shopping and exercising) as examples, this thesis demonstrates that unobtrusive, accurate and robust monitoring of various aspects of daily activities is indeed possible with minimal overhead. Such monitoring can then, in future, enable exciting and useful applications (e.g., smart reminder or proactive retail help in a grocery store or digital personal coach in a gym).

Speaker Biography

Meeralakshmi Radhakrishnan is a PhD candidate in the School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, working in the area of mobile and ubiquitous computing. She is advised by Professor Archan Misra. She received her Bachelor of Engineering degree from the Mahatma Gandhi University, India, in 2011. Prior to joining the PhD programme, she was a Senior Software Engineer at Infosys Limited, India. Her current research focuses on exploiting mobile, wearable and IoT sensing technologies to enable practical lifestyle monitoring applications.