Data Quality and Reliability Assessment of Wearable EMG and IMU Sensor for Construction Activity Recognition

The workforce shortage is one of the significant problems in the construction industry. To overcome the challenges due to workforce shortage, various researchers have proposed wearable sensor-based systems in the area of construction safety and health. Although sensors provide rich and detailed information, not all sensors can be used for construction applications. This study evaluates the data quality and reliability of forearm electromyography (EMG) and inertial measurement unit (IMU) of armband sensors for construction activity classification. To achieve the proposed objective, the forearm EMG and IMU data collected from eight participants while performing construction activities such as screwing, wrenching, lifting, and carrying on two different days were used to analyze the data quality and reliability for activity recognition through seven different experiments. The results of these experiments show that the armband sensor data quality is comparable to the conventional EMG and IMU sensors with excellent relative and absolute reliability between trials for all the five activities. The activity classification results were highly reliable, with minimal change in classification accuracies for both the days. Moreover, the results conclude that the combined EMG and IMU models classify activities with higher accuracies compared to individual sensor models.