Online Monitoring of Daily Energy Expenditure Using Smartphones

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method to empower the people with solutions to monitor their energy expenditure and balance their weight against food intake. In addition, enabling users to share this knowledge with their physicians enhances the physician’s ability to help their patients. In this paper, an application was developed to track user’s physical activity and estimate the energy expenditure using 3-axis accelerometer in a smartphone with android operating system. To implement this system, the accelerometer data was collected from different users as they performed activities like walking and running by wearing the phone in the pants pocket and then classified the user activities on the basics of frequency component present in the acceleration data. Also an application was developed to estimate the energy expenditure in Android SDK during a period of 24 hours. The significance of this work is that, since this lets us to get useful information about the daily routines of millions of users and their energy expenditure just by having them carry their smartphones in their pockets.

Keywords: Energy Expenditure, 3-axis accelerometer, Smartphone, Android, Physical Activity, Android SDK