Smoking detection based on regularity analysis of hand to mouth gestures

A number of studies have been introduced for the detection of smoking via a variety of features extracted from the wrist IMU data. However, none of the previous studies investigated gesture regularity as a way to detect smoking events. This study describes a novel method to detect smoking events by monitoring the regularity of hand gestures. Here, the regularity of hand gestures was estimated from a one axis accelerometer worn on the wrist of the dominant hand. To quantify the regularity score, this paper applied a novel approach of unbiased autocorrelation to process the temporal sequence of hand gestures. The comparison of regularity score of smoking events with other activities substantiated that hand-to-mouth gestures are highly regular during smoking events and have the potential to detect smoking from among a plethora of daily activities. This hypothesis was validated on a dataset of 140 cigarette smoking events generated by 35 regular smokers in a controlled setting. The regularity of gestures detected smoking events with an F1-score of 0.81. However, the accuracy dropped to 0.49 in the free-living study of same 35 smokers smoking 295 cigarettes. Nevertheless, regularity of gestures may be useful as a supportive tool for other detection methods. To validate that proposition, this paper further incorporated the regularity of gestures in an instrumented lighter based smoking detection algorithm and achieved an improvement in F1-score from 0.89 (lighter only) to 0.91 (lighter and regularity of hand gestures).