UAC: Uncertainty-Aware Calibration of Neural Networks for Gesture Detection

Artificial intelligence has the potential to impact safety and efficiency in safety-critical domains such as construction, manufacturing, and healthcare. For example, using sensor data from wearable devices, such as inertial measurement units (IMUs), human gestures can be detected while maintaining privacy, thereby ensuring that safety protocols are followed. However, strict safety requirements in these domains have limited the adoption of AI, since accurate calibration of predicted probabilities and robustness against out-of-distribution (OOD) data is necessary. This paper proposes UAC (Uncertainty-Aware Calibration), a novel two-step method to address these challenges in IMU-based gesture recognition. First, we present an uncertainty-aware gesture network architecture that predicts both gesture probabilities and their associated uncertainties from IMU data. This uncertainty is then used to calibrate the probabilities of each potential gesture. Second, an entropy-weighted expectation of predictions over multiple IMU data windows is used to improve accuracy while maintaining correct calibration. Our method is evaluated using three publicly available IMU datasets for gesture detection and is compared to three state-of-the-art calibration methods for neural networks: temperature scaling, entropy maximization, and Laplace approximation. UAC outperforms existing methods, achieving improved accuracy and calibration in both OOD and in-distribution scenarios. Moreover, we find that, unlike our method, none of the state-of-the-art methods significantly improve the calibration of IMU-based gesture recognition models. In conclusion, our work highlights the advantages of uncertainty-aware calibration of neural networks, demonstrating improvements in both calibration and accuracy for gesture detection using IMU data.