Smartphone Placement Recognition during Walking: Performance Determinants and Real-World Generalizability

The opportunity to collect movement data from smartphones for prolonged periods has opened new perspectives in the field of clinical movement analysis. However, when monitoring people’s mobility in free-living conditions, smartphone placement can influence the validity of the extracted digital mobility outcome. This study aimed to develop and validate an automatic smartphone placement recognition classifier and to investigate potential critical factors that can influence performance.

The classifier was trained on data from 15 healthy participants using inertial signals collected from smartphones placed at six body placements during free-living walking and externally validated on over 3,000 individuals from external datasets, including blind participants and patients with cardiovascular or Parkinson’s disease. A decision-tree ensemble model was developed using feature subsets of increasing dimensionality, with the optimal subset comprising 50 features.

Classification accuracy increased consistently when front and back pocket placements were aggregated (81.1%) and further improved when coat pocket was also included in the pocket class (88.5%), underscoring the challenge of distinguishing between fine-grained pocket placements. The best-recognized placements across the external datasets were lower back (precision: 100%, recall: 72.5%), hand (precision: 94.2%, recall: 94.5%), and the aggregated pocket class (precision: 86.7%, recall: 90.2%). Recognition accuracy changed across cohorts (0.73 – 0.85), activities (0.63 – 0.94) and speed (0.79 – 0.87), however it stayed consistent across various technological and environmental factors.

Overall, this study demonstrates the feasibility of robust placement recognition in walking and underscores the importance of accounting for key influencing factors when designing frameworks intended for deployment in heterogeneous real-world or clinical contexts.

Highlights

• Machine learning accurately identifies smartphone placement during real-world gait

• Six on-body placements recognized, including pockets, hand, bag, and lower-back

• Free-living data used for training, ensuring robust performance across conditions

• Feature selection and hyperparameter tuning optimize classification accuracy

• External validation confirms generalizability across >3,000 healthy and diseased adults