Comparative Analysis of Force-Sensitive Resistors and Triaxial Accelerometers for Sitting Posture Classification

Sedentary behaviors, including poor postures, are significantly detrimental to health, particularly for individuals losing motion ability. This study presents a posture detection system utilizing four force-sensitive resistors (FSRs) and two triaxial accelerometers selected after rigorous assessment for consistency and linearity. We compared various machine learning algorithms based on classification accuracy and computational efficiency. The k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm demonstrated superior performance over Decision Tree, Discriminant Analysis, Naive Bayes, and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Further analysis of KNN hyperparameters revealed that the city block metric with K = 3 yielded optimal classification results. Triaxial accelerometers exhibited higher accuracy in both training (99.4%) and testing (99.0%) phases compared to FSRs (96.6% and 95.4%, respectively), with slightly reduced processing times (0.83 s vs. 0.85 s for training; 0.51 s vs. 0.54 s for testing). These findings suggest that, apart from being cost-effective and compact, triaxial accelerometers are more effective than FSRs for posture detection.