Construction tasks involve various activities composed of one or more body motions. It is essential to understand the dynamically changing behavior and state of construction workers to manage construction workers effectively with regards to their safety and productivity. While several research efforts have shown promising results in activity recognition, further research is still necessary to identify the best locations of motion sensors on a worker's body by analyzing the recognition results for improving the performance and reducing the implementation cost. This study proposes a simulation-based evaluation of multiple motion sensors attached to workers performing typical construction tasks. A set of 17 inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors is utilized to collect motion sensor data from an entire body. Multiple machine learning algorithms are utilized to classify the motions of the workers by simulating several scenarios with different combinations and features of the sensors. Through the simulations, each IMU sensor placed in different locations of a body is tested to evaluate its recognition accuracy toward the worker's different activity types. Then, the effectiveness of sensor locations is measured regarding activity recognition performance to determine relative advantage of each location. Based on the results, the required number of sensors can be reduced maintaining the recognition performance. The findings of this study can contribute to the practical implementation of activity recognition using simple motion sensors to enhance the safety and productivity of individual workers.
展开▼