Intelligent System for Identification of Wheelchair User’s Posture Using Machine Learning Techniques

This paper presents an intelligent system aimed at detecting a person's posture when sitting in a wheelchair. The main use of the proposed system is to warn an improper posture to prevent major health issues. A network of sensors is used to collect data that are analyzed through a scheme involving the following stages: selection of prototypes using condensed nearest neighborhood rule (CNN), data balancing with the Kennard-Stone algorithm, and reduction of dimensionality through principal component analysis. In doing so, acquired data can be both stored and processed into a micro controller. Finally, to carry out the posture classification over balanced, pre-processed data, and the K-nearest neighbors algorithm is used. It turns to be an intelligent system reaching a good tradeoff between the necessary amount of data and performance is accomplished. As a remarkable result, the amount of required data for training is significantly reduced while an admissible classification performance is achieved being a suitable trade given the device conditions.