The purpose of this project is to demonstrate an ability to collect, work with, and clean a data set.
The experiments have been carried out with a group of 30 volunteers within an age bracket of 19-48 years. Each person performed six activities (WALKING, WALKING_UPSTAIRS, WALKING_DOWNSTAIRS, SITTING, STANDING, LAYING) wearing a smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S II) on the waist. Using its embedded accelerometer and gyroscope, we captured 3-axial linear acceleration and 3-axial angular velocity at a constant rate of 50Hz. The experiments have been video-recorded to label the data manually. The obtained dataset has been randomly partitioned into two sets, where 70% of the volunteers was selected for generating the training data and 30% the test data.
The sensor signals (accelerometer and gyroscope) were pre-processed by applying noise filters and then sampled in fixed-width sliding windows of 2.56 sec and 50% overlap (128 readings/window). The sensor acceleration signal, which has gravitational and body motion components, was separated using a Butterworth low-pass filter into body acceleration and gravity. The gravitational force is assumed to have only low frequency components, therefore a filter with 0.3 Hz cutoff frequency was used. From each window, a vector of features was obtained by calculating variables from the time and frequency domain. See 'features_info.txt' for more details.
For each record it is provided:
- Triaxial acceleration from the accelerometer (total acceleration) and the estimated body acceleration.
- Triaxial Angular velocity from the gyroscope.
- A 561-feature vector with time and frequency domain variables.
- Its activity label.
- An identifier of the subject who carried out the experiment.
Once the data has been downloaded, unzipped and saved to an appropriate location run_analysis.R can be run. The code merges the training and test datasets, extracts mean and standard deviation and creates a final tiday dataset with the average for each variable for each activity and subject.