Optimizing echo state networks for continuous gesture recognition in mobile devices: A comparative study

Continuous gesture recognition can be used to enhance human-computer interaction. This can be accomplished by capturing human movement with the use of the Inertial Measurement Units in smartphones and using machine learning algorithms to predict the intended gestures. Echo State Networks (ESNs) consist of a fixed internal reservoir that is able to generate rich and diverse nonlinear dynamics in response to input signals that capture temporal dependencies within the signal. This makes ESNs well-suited for time series prediction tasks, such as continuous gesture recognition. However, their application has not been rigorously explored, with regard to gesture recognition. In this study, we sought to enhance the efficacy of ESN models in continuous gesture recognition by exploring diverse model structures, fine-tuning hyperparameters, and experimenting with various training approaches. We used three different training schemes that used the Leave-one-out Cross-validation (LOOCV) protocol to investigate the performance in real-world scenarios with different levels of data availability: Leaving out data from one user to use for testing ($$-score: 0.89), leaving out a fraction of data from all users to use in testing ($$-score: 0.96), and training and testing using LOOCV on a single user ($$-score: 0.99). The obtained results outperformed the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) performance from past research ($$-score: 0.87) while maintaining a low training time of approximately 13 seconds compared to 63 seconds for the LSTM model. Additionally, we further explored the performance of the ESN models through behaviour space analysis using memory capacity, Kernel Rank, and Generalization Rank. Our results demonstrate that ESNs can be optimized to achieve high performance on gesture recognition in mobile devices on multiple levels of data availability. These findings highlight the practical ability of ESNs to enhance human-computer interaction.