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Updated: Jun 21, 2026

Methodology for Establishing a Community-Wide Life Laboratory for Capturing Unobtrusive and Continuous Remote Activity and Health Data
Published on: July 27, 2018
SONAR, a nursing activity dataset with inertial sensors
Orhan Konak1, Valentin Döring2, Tobias Fiedler2
1University of Potsdam, Digital Engineering Faculty, Digital Health - Connected Healthcare of the Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, 14482, Germany. orhan.konak@hpi.de.
Abstract:
Accurate and comprehensive nursing documentation is essential to ensure quality patient care. To streamline this process, we present SONAR, a publicly available dataset of nursing activities recorded using inertial sensors in a nursing home. The dataset includes 14 sensor streams, such as acceleration and angular velocity, and 23 activities recorded by 14 caregivers using five sensors for 61.7 hours. The caregivers wore the sensors as they performed their daily tasks, allowing for continuous monitoring of their activities. We additionally provide machine learning models that recognize the nursing activities given the sensor data. In particular, we present benchmarks for three deep learning model architectures and evaluate their performance using different metrics and sensor locations. Our dataset, which can be used for research on sensor-based human activity recognition in real-world settings, has the potential to improve nursing care by providing valuable insights that can identify areas for improvement, facilitate accurate documentation, and tailor care to specific patient conditions.

