PDRplus: Human Behaviour Sensing Method for Service Field Analysis

This chapter presents a novel method of estimating position, orientation, and multiple actions of a worker in a service field. In general, pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) is appropriate for effectively estimating the position and orientation of a pedestrian in an indoor environment. However, in actual service fields, PDR is not as accurate for workers’ behaviour sensing when a number of actions for their work other than walking are taking place. Moreover, common sensors for PDR have less information for multiple action recognition other than walking. For realizing human behaviour sensing for service process analysis, we propose a method which integrates human localization and action recognition with the complementary use, named “PDRplus”. In service fields, since position, orientation, and action of a human usually show strong correlation with her or his situation, both the PDR and action recognition can be improved with complementary use of the PDR and action recognition. In this chapter, in order to ensure the effect of the complementary use of the PDR and action recognition, we conducted two types of experiments in real service industry fields. Firstly, we compared accuracies of the action recognition both with and without using the PDR in the restaurant kitchen, and average recognition rate of five types of actions was improved about 19 % points. Secondly, we compared accuracies of the PDR both with and without using the action recognition in house-assembly plants, and average position error was reduced by 19.5 %.