IEEE-International Conference on Recent Trends in Information Technology, ICRTIT 2011

MIT, Anna University, Chennai. June 3-5, 2011

Weighted Support Vector Regression approach for

Remote Healthcare monitoring
Divya#1, Sonali Agarwal#2
#

Indian Institute of Information Technology

Allahabd, India
1

divyatomar26@gmail.com
2
sonali@iiita.ac.in

Abstract- With ever increasing growth in science and technology,

quality of life is improving day by day and health becomes a major
concern for everyone. Since many people living in nuclear families,
special measures need to be taken especially for the old age people
living all alone. Wireless sensor network has become popular due
to advancement in the communication capabilities of data,
computational processing power and low power microelectronic
devices and micro sensors. Body Area sensor network is a
collection of wearable sensor nodes that implanted on human body
for providing continuous monitoring of health conditions.
Basically, we are focusing on how to predict the activity based on
sensor reading. This research paper predicts the activity that is
based on sensor reading so that we can provide continuous
monitoring to patients in order to provide pervasive healthcare. It
is in contrast with the traditional event driven approach where a
patient visits the doctor only when he is sick. Prediction of activity
is done using Support vector Regression (SVR). This paper
presents a model to overcome the over-fitting which is due to noise
and outliers in dataset. So, we propose an approach which uses
weight factor to reduce the prediction error and result in higher
accuracy than simple support vector regression.
Keywords-Wireless sensor network, Support vector regression,
Body Area Sensor Network, weighted coefficient.

I.

INTRODUCTION

There are some diseases like diabetes, asthma, cancer and

heart diseases which require continuous monitoring of the
patient. In event driven approach patient goes to the doctor only
when he falls sick but in continuous monitoring we can monitor
a patient continuously throughout a day. Healthcare has become
a major issue for everyone and we can monitor the health of
patients using small handheld wireless devices that is deployed
on human body. A wireless body area network is a collection of
multiple wearable external and implantable internal sensor
nodes for monitoring the human physical and physiological
behavior in a continuous manner in different environment like

978-1-4577-0590-8/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

hospital, residence and work place [1][2]. The special network

sensors designed to measure human physical parameters having
clinical significance and ranging from micro to nano unit of
applications. The common body sensor products responsible for
data collection and status monitoring are Armband, Glucose
Meter, Pulse Oximeter, Blood Pressure Monitor and Weight
Scale [2][3]. The variety of desired applications such as remote
monitoring, computer-assisted ambulatory monitoring and
continuous observation of day to day activities may be
monitored by using body sensors and ambient sensors [2].
In 1995, Vapnik V and his colleagues presented Support
Vector Machine (SVM).SVM approach is based on the theory of
statistical learning. SVM is used for both classification and
regression approaches. The performance of SVM is excellent in
handling non-linear problems .It uses non linear mapping of
original data from input space to feature space. Due to structural
risk minimization principle, SVM has a good generalization
performance [4] .There are three most potently used methods of
Support vector regression are: SVR, -SVR and LS-SVR
(Least square Support vector regression. SVR is proposed by
Vapnik and it includes , a loss function acts as precision
controller for regression model and make regression more robust
and sparse. This sparseness is used for the estimation of
dependence relation for vast data in the high feature space.
Schlkopf et. al. proposed SVR that control the number of
support Vectors and reduces the computational complexity of
the model [5]. It is also indicates that minimum number of
support vectors is desirable to have less complicated models. It
also adjust automatically according to the model complexity
and the slack variables. LS-SVR is an enhanced version of SVR
proposed by Suykens and others that reduce the computational
complexity of the model [6]. In LS-SVR slack term is used as
square norm in objective function. It transforms inequality
restrictions into equality restrictions to find the solution of a
Karush Kuhn Tucker (KKT) system.
Due to noise and outliers in the dataset SVR suffers from the
over-fitting problem that affects the performance of regression.
The problem associated with real time dataset as presence of

969

IEEE-ICRTIT 2011
noise and outlier is addressed by introducing a weighted
coefficient with already existing SVR .In this research paper, a
weighted coefficient is introduced based on crucial sensor
reading .The reading which is more critical is assigned higher
weight as compared to normal readings. The content of research
paper is as follows. Section 2 highlights relevant research work
in health care monitoring based on Body area sensor network.
Section 3 explains about Body area network topologies. Section
4 presents a multi tier Body area network based on healthcare
environment enhanced by pervasive computing technology.
Section 5 deals with the various SVR techniques to predict the
different activities of a patient with the help of remote
monitoring system. In Section 6, experimental details are
elaborated and also highlight the usefulness of the approach on
the basis of result obtained. Section 7 concludes the paper.
II.

RELATED WORK

To gain insight in the process of activity classification,

research is being carried out with some experimentation in real
conditions. RFID tags were used on 108 home objects [7]. RFID
Receiver proved beneficial to determine the activity performed
by detection of contacts with objects. Another Research uses
homemade ON and OFF sensors [8].These sensors act as simple
switches to detect the usage of objects at home.The CARE
project team [9] differentiated activities with the use of other
sensors like switch, environmental etc. In the research work of
Anthony and his colleagues issue regarding health monitoring of
old people are taken into consideration [10]. In project work
various activities related to daily living were detected and then
on collected information SVM is applied in order to classify
various activities using one-against-all[11]. Research paper
[12] suggests the testing of electrical signatures as another path
and [13] detects the various ADL living. Pattern Recognition
when applied to electrical network helps us to identify the
material being used and instants of turning on and off.
Health monitoring with the help of small wearable body
sensors is a growing research field. An application MIThril is
developed by MIT Media Lab and works on human behavior
recognition [14]. Another project CodeBlue is also focused on
body area sensor network applications for health care [15]. The
research work clearly explains the method of transmitting vital
signs to the health care monitoring agenesis [16]. A research
work by G. Virone et al. proposed a low-cost, ad hoc use of
multimodal sensors for an enhanced quality of medical care
[17].A paper authored by Brown, L developed Human++
UniNode health care application through sensors. In this paper
work skin temperature, conductance and ECG are recorded
through body sensors and these signals are monitored
specifically for health care purposes [18].
A paper authored by M. EIHelw represents a multi sensing
framework with data fusion techniques and behavior profiling of

the users by HMM model [19]. Korel, B.T et. al. proposed a
context awareness for Body area sensor network health
monitoring system to detect abnormal episodes in the signal
[20].
III.

BODY AREA SENSOR NETWORK

The figure 1 (a) indicates different application domains of

body area sensor network. A stand-alone BSN is a collection of
small wireless nodes inside out outside the human body
collected in Star or Mesh topology [2][21]. A coordinator node
collects all the observations and response for input output or
processing related queries. In figure 1 (b) a mobile phone or
PDA is used as a gateway to provide connectivity between a
body area sensor network and an application server through the
Internet [2][21].

Fig. 1(a): Star and Mesh topology body

Sensor Network

Fig. 1 (b): A Body Sensor network

connected to a remote centre using
internetwork

IV. THE PROPOSED ARCHITECTURE

The Proposed Wide Area wireless BSN (WA-WBAN)
architecture is based on sensor fusion multi tire approach
because the application utilizes multiple sensors on a human
body to get better information about the functioning details and
data processing is done at 3 stages. Sensor fusion is a complex
approach because different sensors provide different types of
data, with different accuracy and complexity of information. It
is important to collect inputs from different sensors put them
together in an intelligent and useful way in a real time
environment. The user is monitored by sensors and prompted by
actuators, within wireless body area sensor network or WBASN.
This is referred to as Tier 1 [2] .Each user wears the information
gathered by the components of the WBASN is sent to an
aggregator (often a PC or a smart phone), or personal server
(PC) at hospital area network. This is referred to as Tier 2. The
communications links used between the WBASN and the
personal server will vary according to circumstances; in the
diagram three are shown (ZigBee, Bluetooth, WiFi)[2][22].The
personal server connects over the internet and/or GPRS and/or
other long range communications protocols to various Tier 3
services.

970

Weighted Support Vector Regression approach for Remote Healthcare monitoring

those readings. In this paper we have performed experiment
using two kernel functions that includes:

Wireless Wide Area Network of All connected Hospitals with a

country wide Data repository server for chronic patients

(a) Polynomial kernel function:

(b) Radial basis kernel function:

 J  for >0.

Wireless LAN of the hospital with a central

server

D is the finite sample training data represented as:

Body Area Network of patient with
a personal server on mobile or
PDA

D={(x1,y1),,(xn,yn)},xi Rn.yi R
Where xi is the input data vector and yi is corresponding
dependent variable.SVM regression estimates the unknown
function by following eq:

Fig. 2. Layers of proposed framework

These may include a medical server, a healthcare provider, a

researcher, a caregiver, emergency services, and so forth. Again,
a range of communications protocols are possible here, that
depends on the requirements of the problem domain [2][23]
[24].

 where b R,w  

(1)

On feature space F= .Here w is a weight vector in F, and

 maps input vector x to a vector in F.w and b are obtained
by solving following quadratic optimization problem:

V.SUPPORT VECTOR REGRESSION

Support Vector Machine (SVM) is one of modern techniques

used for both classification and regression task. Theory of SVM
is given by Vapnik and his colleague which is based on
statistical learning theory [4] [25]. SVM has many attractive
features and promising empirical performances.SVM is mainly a
classifier that performs classification task by constructing
optimal hyper plane by which we can separate classes easily.
Recently SVM has been extended to regression tasks and that
can handle multiple categorical and continuous attribute value.
The main benefit of taking SVM is that there are no local
minima; the solution of it is unique and optimum. The training
dataset X can be separated linearly by an optimal hyper plane
which is also called maximal margin hyper plane. Regression
Techniques are used to find out functions to describe the
relationship among different variables. In this paper we present
regression using SVM .If data is non-linearly separable than it
transforms the input data samples from low dimensional input
space to a higher dimensional space that is known as feature
space. For mapping the input data into higher dimensional space
kernel function is used and then SVM constructs an optimal
separating hyper plane in this higher dimensional feature space.
A mathematical model is built using dataset which called
training dataset. We performed experiment using weighted
support vector regression. We introduce a weight factor that
reduces the prediction error. Weight factor is based on sensor
reading and higher weights are assigned to those activities
which are crucial. For example if sensor measures the heart beat
rate that is above 150 and below 80 we assign higher weight to


Subject to 

The constant C >0 are used to determines the trade-off between
the cost that is associated to deviations larger than and
smoothness of f. , * are the usual slack variables. We used
positive Lagrange multipliers , *, , * that solves the
optimization problem (2). Firstly, we convert it into dual form.
We can write the Lagrangian equation as follows:

L= +C
K K





(3)

Then minimizing equation (3) in regard to the primal variables

(w, b, , ), the derivative has to vanish. The dual variables i
and K are eliminated, so we obtain the dual optimization
problem:

971

IEEE-ICRTIT 2011

(4)
 

Where *= (1,, N ,1* ,N*) T and k (xi, xj) =
I I .The estimate of regression function at any given
point of time x is then:

Body Media [2][30]. We have done our experiment using matlab 7.0. We aimed to find a regression curve to approximate the
true curve using the given samples. In this experiment,
comparison of different SVR techniques have been performed
using polynomial and Gaussian kernels functions and calculate
root mean square error and mean absolute error with weight and
without weight. Result of experiment shows that LS-SVR with
weighted coefficient function has better accuracy than others.

Mean Absolute Error 



By exploiting the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions we

computed the value of b.
In our experiment we use least square Support vector
regression because of its effectiveness and completeness and
estimate the model performance of our model with cross
validation .Another advantage of LSSVM is that model
optimization and calculation can be performed relatively fast.
The optimization problem is replaced by the following
equations:

w+ 

Root Mean Squared Error RMSE=

Where, - Predicted value by the model.
- Value actually observed.
n - Total count of data points.

Where  +b+
The resulting LSSVM model for function regression becomes:

TABLE I
COMPARISON OF MEAN ABSOLUTE ERROR OF
DIFFERENT SVR METHODS

LS-SVR
Kernel
Function



In the traditional LS-SVR, all the training datasets are treated

uniformly. However, in many real world problems, different
data points contribute differently in the learning of predictive
function. We introduce a Weight factor to reduce the prediction
error and that is based on sensor reading and gives more weight
to that activity which is crucial. For example if sensor measures
the heart beat rate that is above 150 and below 80 we assign
higher weight to those readings. So, we modify the equation 6
as:



It is clear that a smaller weight factor qi reduces the effect of the

parameters e , such that the corresponding data points is treated
as less important and for which weight factor is high is treated
as more important.

VI. EXPERIMENT AND RESULT

In this research work, for the classification purpose we
choose a real time body area sensor network data set taken from

972

-SVR

-SVR

Without
weight

With
Weight

Without
weight

With
weight

Without
weight

With
weight

Polynomial

0.1788

0.0768

0.5110

0.5079

0.3337

0.1392

Gaussian

0.1681

0.0699

0.2302

0.2280

0.3199

0.1344

TABLE II
COMPARISON OF ROOT MEAN SQUARE ERROR OF
DIFFERENT SVR METHODS
LS-SVR
Kernel
Function

-SVR

-SVR

Without
weight

With
Weight

Without
weight

With
weight

Without
weight

With
weight

Polynomial

0.2488

0.1048

0.5655

0.2868

0.1938

0.1392

Gaussian

0.2417

0.0768

0.5626

0.2831

0.1967

0.1344

Weighted Support Vector Regression approach for Remote Healthcare monitoring

VII.CONCLUSION:
Human resource of a nation contributes in the development of
a country. Its man-power should be healthy enough to actively
participate in the growth activities. No nation can prosper with
unhealthy human resource. Therefore, it is essential to develop a
system that enables continuous monitoring of people that are
suffering from terminal diseases. This paper has proposed the
architecture for collecting physiological information of patient.
In this architecture, we predict the user activities based on the
sensor readings. Patients perform day to day activities along
with wearable sensor .These sensors provide the system with the
physiological readings. Thus, system predicts the user activity
using Support Vector Regression. Normally there are three
techniques, namely LS-SVR, SVR, SVR, that are used in
SVR. We performed experiment using two kernel function
namely polynomial and Gaussian kernel function. Also, weight
factor was introduced in the physiological information in order
to improve the accuracy. Result of experiment shows that LSSVR using Gaussian kernel function with weight has highest
accuracy as compared to other techniques.
VIII. REFERENCES:
[1]. Liolios et. al. An Overview of Body Sensor Networks
in Enabling Perva-sive Healthcare and Assistive
Environments PETRA 10, June 23 - 25, 2010, Samos,
Greece. Copyright 2010 ACM ISBN 978-1-45030071-1/10/06.
[2]. Agarwal Sonali, Divya, Pandey G.N.SVM based

context awareness using Body Area Sensor

Network for pervasive healthcare monitoring,
2010 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0010.
[3]. Andrew D. Jurik, Alfred C. Weaver, "Body Sensors:
Wireless Access to Physiological Data," IEEE Software,
vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 71-73, Jan./Feb. 2009,
doi:10.1109/MS.2009.5.
[4]. V. Vapnik, Statistical Learning Theory, Wiley, 1998.
[5]. B. Schlkopf, Smola A J, Bartlety P L, New support
vector algorithms, Neural Computation, 2000, 12, pp.
1207-1245.
[6]. Suyokens J A K, Vandewalle J, Least squares support
vector machine
classifiers, Neural Processing
Letters, 1999, 9(3),pp. 293-300.
[7]. M. Philipose, K. P. Fishkin, M. Perkowitz, D. J.
Patterson, D. Fox, H. Kautz, and D. Hahnel, Inferring
activities from interactions with objects, IEEE
Pervasing Comput., vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 5057, Oct. 2004.
[8]. E. Tapia, S. Intille, and K. Larson, Activity recognition
in the home using simple and ubiquitous sensors, in
Proc. Int. Conf. Pervasive Comput., Lecture Notes in
Computer Sciences, 2004, vol. 3001, pp. 158175.

973

[9]. B. Krose, T. van Kasteren, C. Gibson, and T. van den

Dool, Care: Context awareness in residences for
elderly, presented at the Int. Conf. Int.
Soc.Gerontechnol., Pisa, Tuscany, Italy, Jun. 47, 2008.
[10]. Anthony Fleury*, Member, IEEE, Norbert Noury,
Senior Member, IEEE, and Michel Vacher, Supervised
Classification of Activities of Daily Living in Health
Smart Homes using SVM, presented at the 31st Annual
International Conference of the IEEE EMBS
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, September 2-6, 2009.
[11]. Anthony Fleury, Member, IEEE, Michel Vacher, and
Norbert Noury, Senior Member, IEEE, SVM-Based
Multimodal Classification of Activities of Daily Living
in Health Smart Homes: Sensors, Algorithms, and First
Experimental Results, IEEE Transactions on
Information Technology In Biomedicine, vol. 14, no. 2,
March 2010.
[12]. S. Tsukamoto, H. Hoshino, and T. Tamura, Study on
indoor activity monitoring by using electric field
sensor, presented at the Int. Conf. Int. Soc.
Gerontechnol., Pisa, Tuscany, Italy, Jun. 47, 2008.
[13]. M. Berenguer, M. Giordani, F. Giraud-By, and N.
Noury, Automatic detection of activities of daily living
from detecting and classifying electrical events on the
residential power line, in Proc. 10th IEEE Int. Conf. eHealth Netw., Appl. Serv. HealthCom, 2008, pp. 2932.
[14]. DeVaul, R.W., Sung, M., Gips, J., and Pentland, S.,
MIThril 2003: Applications and Architecture. In
Proceedings of ISWC 2003, (White Plains, U.S.A.,
2003).
[15]. Georgios Kambourakis et. al. Securing Medical
Sensor Environments: The CodeBlue Framework Case
Second International Conference on Availability,
Reliability and Security (ARES'07) 0-7695-2775-2/07
$20.00 2007.
[16]. Harvard University. CodeBlue project: Wireless
Sensor
Networks
for
Medical
Care.
Available:http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/code
blue/
[17]. G. Virone, A. Wood, L. Selavo, Q. Cao, L. Fang, T.
Doan, Z. He, R. Stoleru, S. Lin, and J. A. Stankovic,
An Advanced Wireless Sensor Network for Health
Monitoring," at Transdisciplinary Conference on
Distributed Diagnosis and Home Healthcare (D2H2),
Arlington, VA, April 2-4, 2006.
[18]. Brown, L et. al. Body area network for monitoring
autonomic nervous system responses This paper
appears in: Print ISBN: 978-963-9799-42-4 , Digital
Object
Identifier:10.4108/ICST.PERVASIVEHEA
LTH2009.5973
[19]. M. EIHelw et al An Integrated Multi-Sensing
Framework for Pervasive Healthcare Monitoring Digital
Object
Identifier:10.4108/ICST.PERVASIV

IEEE-ICRTIT 2011
EHEALTH2009.6038.http://dx.doi.org/10.4108/ICST.P
ERVASIVEHEALTH2009.6038
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=05
191197
[20]. Korel, B.T.; Koo, S.G.M.; Addressing Context
Awareness Techniques in Body Sensor Networks This
paper appears in: Advanced Information Networking
and Applications Workshops, 2007, ISBN: 978-0-76952847-2
,
,
Digital
Object
Identifier:
10.1109/AINAW.2007.69
[21]. Guang-Zhong Yang et al. Body Sensor networks
ISBN-10: 1-84628-272-1, ISBN-13: 978-1-84628-2720, Springer-Verlag London Limited 2006.
[22]. Jin-Shyan Lee;Yu-Wei Su;Chung-Chou Shen ;, A
Comparative
Study
of
Wireless
Protocols:
Bluetooth,UWB, ZigBee and Wi-Fi, Industrial
Electronics Society ,2007.IECON 2007.33rd Annual
Conference of the IEEE,vol.,no.,pp. 46-51,5-8
Nov.2007doi:10.1109/IECON.2007.4460126.
[23]. Mukherji, R.; Egyhazy, C.; Johnson, M.; ,
"Architecture for a large healthcare information system,"
IT Professional , vol.4, no.6, pp. 19- 27, Nov/Dec 2002
doi: 10.1109/MITP.2002.1114843
[24]. Joonyoung Jung et al , Wireless Body Area Network
in a Ubiquitous Healthcare System for Physiological
Signal Monitoring and Health Consulting International
Journal of Advanced Science and Technology
http://www.sersc.org/journals/IJSIP/vol1_no1/papers/06.
pdf.
[25]. C.-W. Hsu and C.-J. Lin A comparison of methods for
multi-class support vector machines, IEEE Transactions
on Neural Networks, 13:415-425, 2002.
[26]. Wu, W.H.; Batalin, M.A.; Au, L.K.; Bui, A.A.T.;
Kaiser, W.J.; , "Context-aware Sensing of Physiological
Signals," Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society,
2007. EMBS 2007. 29th Annual International
Conference of the IEEE , vol., no., pp.5271-5275, 22-26
Aug.2007doi: 10.1109/IEMBS.2007.4353531
[27]. Benny P.L. Lo; Guang-Zhong Yang; "Body Sensor
Networks: Infrastructure for Life Science Sensing
Research," Life Science Systems and Applications
Workshop, 2006. IEEE/NLM , vol., no., pp.1-2,July
2006doi:10.1109/LSSA.2006.250376.URL: http://ieeex
plore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4015777
&isnumber=4015776
[28]. Sunseri, M The SenseWear armband as a Sleep
Detection Device http://www.bodymedia.com/Learn
More/Whitepapers/The-SenseWear-armband-as-aSleep-Detection-Device
[29]. Craig B. Liden et. al. Characterization and
Implications of the Sensors Incorporated into the
SenseWear Armband for Energy Expenditure and

974

ActivityDetectionwww.bodymedia.com/site/docs/paper
s/Sensors.pdf
[30]. Physiological
Data
Modeling
Contest
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~sherstov/pdmc/
[31]. Chang-An Wu and Hong-Bing Liu,An Improved
Support Vector Regression Based on Classification,
2007 International Conference on Multimedia and
Ubiquitous Engineering (MUE'07).
[32]. Weimin Huang, Leping Shen ,Weighted Support
Vector Regression Algorithm Based on Data
Description , 2008 ISECS International Colloquium on
Computing, Communication, Control, and Management.
[33]. Likun Hou, Qingxin YangJinlong, An Improved
LSSVM Regression Algorithm, 2009 International
Conference on Computational Intelligence and Natural
Computing.