Multimodal fusion of IMUs and EPS body-worn sensors for scratch recognition

In order to develop and evaluate the extent to which itching affects a person's daily life, it is useful to develop automated means to recognise the action of scratching. We present an investigation of sensors and algorithms to realise a wearable scratch detection device. We collected a dataset, where each user wore 4 inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors and one electric potential sensor (EPS). Data were collected from nine users, where each user followed a 40-min protocol, which involved scratching different parts of head, shoulder, and leg, as well as other activities such as walking, drinking water, brushing teeth, and typing to a computer. The dataset contained 813 scratching instances and 5 h 15 min of recorded data. We investigated the trade-offs between the number of devices worn (comfort) and accuracy. We trained the k-NN and random forest algorithms by using between 1 and 5 features per channel. We concluded that a scratch could be detected with 80.7% accuracy by using the random forest algorithm on hand coordinates, which required four devices. However, an f1 score of 70% could be achieved with k-NN with IMU and EPS data, which only required one device. Moreover, the fusion of IMU data with EPS data improved the accuracy and reduced the deviation between the folds. This expanded the state-of-the-art method by opening up new trade-offs between accuracy and comfort for future research