Engineering Product Development, Singapore University of Technology and Design, 8 Somapah Road, Singapore 487372, Singapore.
CNRS, CPT, Aix Marseille University, Université de Toulon, 13009 Marseille, France.
Sensors (Basel). 2020 Nov 27;20(23):6786. doi: 10.3390/s20236786.
Barometers are among the oldest engineered sensors. Historically, they have been primarily used either as environmental sensors to measure the atmospheric pressure for weather forecasts or as altimeters for aircrafts. With the advent of microelectromechanical system (MEMS)-based barometers and their systematic embedding in smartphones and wearable devices, a vast breadth of new applications for the use of barometers has emerged. For instance, it is now possible to use barometers in conjunction with other sensors to track and identify a wide range of human activity classes. However, the effectiveness of barometers in the growing field of human activity recognition critically hinges on our understanding of the numerous factors affecting the atmospheric pressure, as well as on the properties of the sensor itself-sensitivity, accuracy, variability, etc. This review article thoroughly details all these factors and presents a comprehensive report of the numerous studies dealing with one or more of these factors in the particular framework of human activity tracking and recognition. In addition, we specifically collected some experimental data to illustrate the effects of these factors, which we observed to be in good agreement with the findings in the literature. We conclude this review with some suggestions on some possible future uses of barometric sensors for the specific purpose of tracking human activities.
气压计是最古老的工程传感器之一。从历史上看，它们主要用作环境传感器来测量大气压力以进行天气预报，或者用作飞机的高度计。随着基于微机电系统 (MEMS) 的气压计的出现及其在智能手机和可穿戴设备中的系统嵌入，气压计的新用途已经出现了广泛的多样性。例如，现在可以结合使用气压计和其他传感器来跟踪和识别各种人类活动类别。然而，气压计在日益发展的人类活动识别领域的有效性关键取决于我们对影响大气压力的众多因素的理解，以及对传感器自身特性的理解——灵敏度、准确性、可变性等。本文详细介绍了所有这些因素，并全面报告了在人类活动跟踪和识别的特定框架内处理这些因素之一或多个因素的众多研究。此外，我们特别收集了一些实验数据来说明这些因素的影响，我们发现这些数据与文献中的发现非常吻合。我们以一些关于气压传感器在跟踪人类活动方面的特定用途的未来可能用途的建议结束了这篇综述。
