Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 5, 2025

Methodology for Establishing a Community-Wide Life Laboratory for Capturing Unobtrusive and Continuous Remote Activity and Health Data
Published on: July 27, 2018
A multi-sensor dataset with annotated activities of daily living recorded in a residential setting
Emma L Tonkin1, Michael Holmes2, Hao Song2
1University of Bristol, Bristol, UK. e.l.tonkin@bristol.ac.uk.
Abstract:
SPHERE is a large multidisciplinary project to research and develop a sensor network to facilitate home healthcare by activity monitoring, specifically towards activities of daily living. It aims to use the latest technologies in low powered sensors, internet of things, machine learning and automated decision making to provide benefits to patients and clinicians. This dataset comprises data collected from a SPHERE sensor network deployment during a set of experiments conducted in the 'SPHERE House' in Bristol, UK, during 2016, including video tracking, accelerometer and environmental sensor data obtained by volunteers undertaking both scripted and non-scripted activities of daily living in a domestic residence. Trained annotators provided ground-truth labels annotating posture, ambulation, activity and location. This dataset is a valuable resource both within and outside the machine learning community, particularly in developing and evaluating algorithms for identifying activities of daily living from multi-modal sensor data in real-world environments. A subset of this dataset was released as a machine learning competition in association with the European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML-PKDD 2016).

