Detecting Childcare Activities Using an Off-the-shelf Smartwatch

The childcare environment has significantly changed, owing to accelerating women's social advancement and the increasing number of nuclear families. Improving and supporting childcare have become major challenges in current society. Automatically recording and subsequently observing childcare activities can be used for various purposes to support childcare. However, methods to detect childcare activities using off-the-shelf devices have not yet been proposed. This study develops a method to detect childcare activities that parents perform for their babies using an off-the-shelf wearable device. We define nine childcare activities and develop corresponding detection models based on motion-sensor data from a smartwatch. Our evaluation in a laboratory setting resulted in classification performances of 71% (F1: 0.66).