Mobility profile and wheelchair driving skills of powered wheelchair users: Sensor-based event recognition using a support vector machine classifier

This paper presents a method to automatically recognize events and driving activities during the use of a powered wheelchair (PW). The method uses a support vector machine classifier, trained from sensor-based data from a datalogging platform installed on the PW. Data from a 3D accelerometer positioned on the back of the PW were collected in a laboratory space during PW driving tasks. 16-segmented events and driving activities (i.e. impacts from different side on different objects, rolling down or up on incline surface, going across threshold of different height) were performed repeatedly (n=25 trials) by one operator at three different speeds (slow, normal, high). We present results from an experiment aiming to classify five different events and driving activities from the sensor data acquired using the datalogging platform. Classification results show the ability of the proposed method to reliably segment 100% of events, and to identify the correct event type in 80% of events.