Monitor and Understand Pilgrims: Data Collection using ...

1 Monitor and Understand Pilgrims: data Collection using Smartphonesand Wearable DevicesAmir MuaremiETH ZurichWearable Computing Lab8092 Zurich, Tr osterETH ZurichWearable Computing Lab8092 Zurich, SeiterETH ZurichWearable Computing Lab8092 Zurich, BexhetiEPFLA rtificial Intelligence Lab1015 Lausanne, to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work forpersonal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are notmade or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bearthis notice and the full citation on the first page.

2 Copyrights for componentsof this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting withcredit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or toredistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Requestpermissions from 13 Adjunct, September 8 12, 2013, Zurich, 2013 ACM 978-1-4503-2215-7/13 $ year, millions of people visit the sacred sites inMakkah and Madinah. Even though the Hajj pilgrimage isone of the biggest annual events in the world, with manyof the pilgrims reporting it as a life-changing experience,quite a little is done to objectively Monitor the pilgrimsand to Understand from the crowd and from the individualpoint of view what makes this event so special.

3 Wepresent a data Collection phase of 8 days of pilgrimage inApril 2013 with 41 pilgrims carrying Android smartphonesand 10 pilgrims wearing two physiological sensors, namelychest belts and wrist-worn devices. We describe the datarecording itself, and emphasize the problems raised andthe challenges faced during the study. We provide thebest practices for performing solid and efficient userstudies in such a difficult environment, and give firstinsights towards measuring important aspects of the Hajjpilgrimage such as recognition of activities and stages,analysis of group behavior, detection of stressful situationsand health monitoring of pilgrims in KeywordsWearable sensors, smartphones, data Collection , activityrecognition, stress detection, health monitoring, pilgrimageACM Classification [Information Systems].

4 International Workshop on Human Activity Sensing Corpus and Its Application (HASCA2013)UbiComp 13, September 8 12, 2013, Zurich, Switzerland 679 IntroductionPilgrimage is a journey in search for spiritual relief. It isimportant for people of many different religious statistics show that the total number of peopleparticipating in pilgrimages, of all religious faiths, isgrowing [2].Hajj is an annual Muslim pilgrimage and is one of the fivepillars of Islam. It is a very old event with the same ritualsdating back to the time of prophet Abraham. Every adultwhich fulfills the physical and financial requirements hasto perform the pilgrimage at least once in his or herlifetime.

5 During the pilgrimage , millions of people from allover the world congregate for religious rituals in the holycity of Makkah and the sites around the city. Umrah, alsoknown as the small Hajj, is the pilgrimage to Makkahoutside the period of Hajj. The holy city of Madinah isvisited as well in both pilgrimages, Umrah and Hajj. Eventhough Hajj is one of the biggest and oldest events, stilllittle is done to objectively Monitor the pilgrims and tounderstand what makes this event by the significance of pilgrimages, we identifiedseveral research fields which can be grouped into thefollowing four behaviour analysiscan be used to understandhow people spread and how they come together andbuild closely-connected recognitioncan provide insights on theemotional load of pilgrims which cannot becaptured by the group behaviour monitoringof individuals using wearablesensors is an essential aspect for the well-being and activity recognitionis significant formonitoring the pilgrimage and its are several stages performed during thepilgrimage, such as the daily prayers.

6 The Tawaf andSa i rituals, the supplication on the mount ofArafat, etc [7].Results in the above-mentioned research areas are of greatinterest for the personal and organizational aspect ofpilgrimage. They offer several improvements such as theability to predict and overcome high density of masses orrecognition of stressful and anxious situations of health issues can provide feedback toindividuals and inform the medical team for fastinterventions. This is particularly important, since most ofthe Hajj pilgrims are of very old age. Furthermore,pilgrims can be shown the completeness of theirpilgrimage journey in terms of performed , the emerging technologies of smartphones andwearable devices allow an enriched and deepeneddimension of data analysis.

7 In our study, the participantswear commercially available chest belt sensors andwrist-worn devices during the Umrah pilgrimage . As aresult, the data Collection presented in this work can beseen as a big step towards gaining insights on most of thedefined research the next section, we provide information about relatedwork and describe the contribution of our work. Then, wedescribe the data Collection approaches and the sensormodalities used. We stress out the challenges encounteredand the lessons learnt. Furthermore, we evaluate thecompleteness of the collected data and show results on apreliminary activity recognition experiment.

8 We concludethe work by showing the next steps on data analysis andimprovements for the upcoming Hajj : International Workshop on Human Activity Sensing Corpus and Its Application (HASCA2013)UbiComp 13, September 8 12, 2013, Zurich, Switzerland 680 Related WorkThere are several studies done on tracking and monitoringpilgrims using smartphone devices. Most of them focus ondesigning systems for identifying pilgrims in case they getlost or cannot find the way out of the massive works in [10] and [13] describe two frameworks thatprovide pilgrim tracking using GSM- and 3G-enabledmobile phones.

9 HajjCore [4] is an institute for appliedFigure 1:Zephyr BioHarness 3research in Hajj and Umrah. Its main goal is to improveFigure 2:Empatica E2the transportation infrastructure and crowd managementservices for Hajj and Umrah. HajjDoc [8] aims at efficientcollection of geo-tagged data , such as images, videos andaudio recordings, through smartphones distributed topilgrims. These data serve as input for creating anenriched documentation of the Hajj and Umrahpilgrimages. To the best of our knowledge, there is noresearch contribution yet in our four areas of interest suchas stage and activity recognition, group behaviour,detection of stressful situations, and health monitoring ofpilgrims in general.

10 Contrary to this, similar studies usingsmartphones and wearable sensors have been carried outin areas different than work in [3] is in the domain of activity and stagerecognition, which has developed and evaluatedalgorithms for detecting physical activities from dataacquired using wearable accelerometers. Contrary to thiswork, where acceleration is the only modality used, weincorporate a multi-modal Human Dynamics Lab [12] has done several studieson group behaviour using wearable systems. Theircontribution in [17] and [14] shows how wearable sensingtechnology using physical activity, voice patterns andspatial proximity can be applied in predictingorganizational behaviour.