Poster: A Non-Invasive Context-Aware Dehydration Alert System
Nandan Kulkarni, Christopher Compton, Jooseppi Luna, Mohammad Arif Ul Alam
Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Lowell, MA, USA
ABSTRACT
We propose Monitoring My Dehydration (MMD), a novel context-
aware real-time Android-based tool that can instantly detect hu-
man dehydration level by utilizing wearable Electrodermal Ac-
tivity (EDA) sensors in conjunction with signal processing and
machine learning. Experimental evaluation on real-world collected
data over 5 users provide improved dehydration estimation perfor-
mance (84.5%) with satisfactory feasibility study and trustworthy
explanation.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Human-centered computing → Ubiquitous and mobile com-
puting.
KEYWORDS
mobile computing, dehydration, health, machine learning, Empat-
ica, Electrodermal Activity
ACM Reference Format:
Nandan Kulkarni, Christopher Compton, Jooseppi Luna, Mohammad Arif Ul
Alam. 2021. Poster: A Non-Invasive Context-Aware Dehydration Alert Sys-
tem. In The 22nd International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and
Applications (HotMobile ’21), February 24–26, 2021, Virtual, United Kingdom.
ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3446382.3448668
1 INTRODUCTION
Despite increased risks of disability, mortality and hospital admis-
sions associated with water-loss, dehydration is often unnoticed due
to lack of immediate symptoms and instant measurement that ne-
cessitates the dehydration measurement tool significantly. However,
current techniques for measuring hydration are either expensive,
inconvenient, inaccurate or invasive. One of the more expensive
‘gold standard’ techniques involves having the subject ingest an
isotope in a known amount, and then calculating the concentration
of the isotope in a bodily fluid to determine the relative amount of
water in the body. Less complicated (but less precise) techniques
involve weighing the subject or taking urine samples [1]. Although,
many researches showed many promises context-aware explainable
dehydration monitoring tool has never been developed or released
to date.
Monitoring dehydration using EDA data is relatively new con-
cept [2, 3] and most of the promising works have been published
in 2020 [10–13]. Mendelsen et. al. [2] studied on artificially created
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ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8323-3/21/02.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3446382.3448668
dehydrated events by avoiding liquids for sometime and compare
Stroop Task before and after dehydration via EDA data. Another
similar work is concerned with extracting features from EDA data
using a variety of methods and developed a new algorithm, cubic
SE-KNN, for the fast and efficient interpretation of EDA data into
EDA achieving 91% of accuracy [3]. Liaqat et. al. proposed similar
approach with details correlation analysis between dehydration
and serious health conditions [13]. Rizwan et. al. used manually
created dehydration events (hydrated and dehydrated) by avoiding
water consumption for 10 hours based on two postures (sitting and
standing) achieving an accuracy of 87% [10]. Above works provided
one of the major shortcomings of their study is that the hydration
was only being sensed in a very controlled environment, where
participants were asked to keep themselves dehydrated for certain
time. MMD uses an Electrodermal Activity (EDA) sensor integrated
wearable wristband on human subjects, which, studies have shown,
can be linked to moisture levels in the skin.
2 METHODOLOGY
2.1 Overall Framework
MMD connected with Empatica E4 watch collects raw data about the
user and does some basic preprocessing. It then sends this data to the
user’s smartphone over Bluetooth. Once this is done, the data is fed
to a pre-trained machine learning model using WEKA Java library.
Then, if the machine learning model predicts a change in hydration
level, it will trigger a method that sends the user a notification to
alert them on their changed hydration level. Finally, MMD provides
a trustworthy explanation and validated by feasibility user study.
2.2 Electrodermal Activity Signal Processing
Electrodermal activity also known as skin conductance or Galvanik
Skin Response measurement over time includes two components:
(i) Tonic Changes which is actually a slow change over skin conduc-
tance base level (SBL) that, also, indicates the general activation
of the sympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic nervous system
activation is responsible for sudden arousal caused by stress. (ii)
Phasic Changes also known as Skin Conductance Responses (SCRs)
changes that last for shorter periods. SCRs indicate the activation
of the somatic nervous system (SNS). SNS mostly gets activated
due to body movements, energy expenditures (due to activities) or
simply by bodily discomfort level (too hot weather). We employed
butterworth low-pass filter, hanning smoothing with window size
4 and manual movement artifact correction. We decomposed EDA
data into its tonic and phasic components via Continuous Decompo-
sition Analysis (CDA) and Discrete Decomposition Analysis (DDA)
as discussed below.
Continuous Decomposition Analysis (CDA): This method
helps extract the phasic (driver) information underlying EDA signal,
and aims at retrieving the signal characteristics of the underlying
HotMobile ’21, February 24–26, 2021, Virtual, United Kingdom Nandan Kulkarni, Christopher Compton, Jooseppi Luna, Mohammad Arif Ul Alam

sudomotor nerve activity (SNA). EDA data is deconvolved by the

general response shape which results in a large increase of temporal
2.4 Hydration Level Detection
precision and then data is decomposed into continuous phasic and
tonic components [5]. We tracked the related events as our pre- Adaptive Multi-label activity recognition can provide instant postu-
labeled activities and extracted 7 time-domain features from CDA. ral and drinking water events classification. However, our ultimate
We used standard deviation, mean and variances on these features goal is to detect instant hydration level using EDA signal. We first
over the activity window. extracted 12 EDA features from EDA raw signal and fed them into
Discrete Decomposition Analysis (DDA): This method de- machine learning models. Then our context recognizer provided
composes EDA data into distinct phasic components and a tonic gestural and postural activities, and we fed 14 features (12+two
component by means of Nonnegative Deconvolution. The method activities) into machine learning models. We developed 5 traditional
helps capture and explore all intra-individual deviations of the machine learning models (Random Forest classifiers, Decision Tree
general response shape and compute a detailed full model of all classifiers, Naive Bayes classifiers, BayesNet classifiers and Multi-
components in the entire data set [6]. This method is particularly layer perceptron classifiers) using WEKA platform and reported
suited for physiological models of the SCR. We extracted 5 features the best performances.
from DDA for each activity window and extracted statistical mean,
variance and standard deviation on these over the activity session. Table 1: Acc, Sen and Spe represent accuracy, sensitivity and
Feature Selection: We extracted a total 12 features from decom- specificity. Raw EDA, 12 features and 14 features represent
position that are subject to be proportional to skin conductance EDA signal only, deconvolution with feature extraction of
or skin moisture level [5, 6]. We use state-of-art machine learn- EDA signals only and deconvolution with feature extraction
ing models to train the hydration level using 12 features over a in addition to recognized two activities respectively.
pre-selected window.
DT RF NB MLP BN
Raw EDA
2.3 Adaptive Multi-Label Activity Recognition Acc 81.3 ±2.1 79.3±8.3 69.5±1.2 78.4±0.2 69.2±2.3
Sen 85.6±0.1 78.6±1.3 73.8±1.8 80.9±3.1 60.3±3.6
Model Spe 86.8±0.3 83.5±4.0 74.7±2.3 78.6±2.3 64.7±6.5
Power 95.6 86.4 98.4 83.5 90.5
We consider four postural activities (walking, sitting, standing and 12 Features
lying) and two hand gestures (drinking water and not drinking Acc 85.5 ±3.1 83.8±7.2 74.9±2.1 82.5±2.2 69.2±2.3
Sen 89.8±2.1 87.7±1.4 78.3±1.5 85.3±4.1 60.3±3.6
water) during our 30 minutes pre-data collection session. We used Spe 90.2±2.4 88.4±3.2 80.5±1.1 86.5±1.2 64.7±6.5
Alam et. al. proposed gestural and postural activity related signal Power 94.3 85.2 97.5 80.4 88.1
14 features
separation method [7–9] and passed both signals in a two input Acc 93.5 ±0.1 89.2±8.3 75.3±1.2 84.2±0.2 69.2±2.3
two output Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model. The CNN Sen 96.5±0.1 91.3±1.3 79.5±1.8 86.8±3.1 60.3±3.6
Spe 96.3±0.3 90.4±4.0 78.3±2.3 89.2±2.3 64.7±6.5
model has feature layer of structure 16 1x1 filter, 2D CNN with 64 Power 93.5 83.7 95.4 80.2 87.5
1x1 filter, 2D CNN with 64 1x1 filter, and classification layer of a fully
connected layer of size 100. We use our previously collected data
[7] to train the CNN model, freeze the feature layer and re-train
the CNN model using our newly collected data as shown in Fig 1. 3 EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION
3.1 Data Collection and Annotation
We recruit 5 Muslim participants (age range 23-35, average 27)
during the month of Ramadan (between April 23rd, 2020 and May
23rd, 2020 ) to collect two types of datasets: i) Scripted Activity
Dataset and 2. Hydration Dataset. The month of Ramadan is a
holy month when religious Muslims honor this special month by
fasting from sunrise to sunset in total 16-17 hours. During this
time, fasting Muslims do not intake any foods or drinks. We took
advantage of this special occasion and recruited 5 religious Muslims
who were fasting for a month which created a natural data collec-
tion environment for us. For collecting Scripted Activity Dataset, on
the first day of data collection, we asked participants to perform
4 different postural activities and two different gestural activities
for 30 minutes. We recorded those performed activities, labeled
them well and used for training and testing activity recognition
framework. For collecting Hydration Dataset, the participants wore
the Empatica E4 wristband for 24 hours for 5 days each in their
Figure 1: Our Simple Adaptive Multi-label Activity Recogni- natural living environment. We asked participants to keep a note
tion Framework regarding their thirst level every hour during the data collection
with four hydration levels: well-hydrated, hydrated, dehydrated
and very hydrated. We instructed them to label events as follows:
Poster: A Non-Invasive Context-Aware Dehydration Alert System
(i) when is the first time he/she felt thirsty after the last water in-
take (transition from well-hydrated to hydrated), (ii) when he/she
felt extremely thirsty as a second time (transition from hydrated
to dehydrated), (iii) when he/she started feeling extremely thirsty
that his/her tongue goes dry, (iv) when he/she started taking wa-
ter/food by breaking the fasting (transition from very dehydrated
to hydrated) and finally (v) when he/she finished taking food/water
(transition from hydrated to well-hydrated).
3.2 Results Analysis
We considered a leave-one-person-out method to generate train-
ing and testing experiment, took average accuracy, sensitivity and
specificity as final score and reported standard deviation of the
accuracy across of all tests as ±std format. Table 1 shows result
analysis in detail in terms of all factors involved in the study. We
created three use cases: (i) using the raw EDA signal as input the
machine learning model (most of the existing works [10–13]), (ii)
using 12 features extracted from deconvolution and without ac-
tivity recognition model and (iii) using 14 features extracted from
deconvolution and activity recognition model. We have achieved
89% and 88% activity recognition accuracy for postural and gestural
level activities respectively.
Dehydration Estimation Model: We first run two different
deconvolution methods on 5 seconds window EDA data and then
compute the 12 different features as described before. Additionally,
We consider activity recognition model provided contexts (gestural
and postural activities) as two more features in our dehydration esti-
mation model resulting 14 features for the input of our dehydration
estimation model. We used Java based deconvolution framework
‘DeconvolutionLab’ [4] to implement above methods and extract 12
EDA features. On the other hand, pre-trained python-based activity
recognition model saved as TFLite format provides two contexts
(postural and gestural activities) of users forming a feature of 14
unique features for dehydration estimation model. We consider 4
different classes of hydration level: (1) Well Hydrated, (2) Hydrated,
(3) Dehydrated, and (4) Very Dehydrated. Several machine learning
models were trained in WEKA. Models produced include Random
Forest (RF), Decision Tree (DT), Naive Bayes (NB), BayesNet (BN)
and Multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifiers.
Accuracy Analysis: From Table 1, we can see that, using only
raw EDA sensor signal, we can have maximum accuracy of 81%
(Decision Tree algorithm) with 85% sensitivity and 86% specificity.
One the other hand, if we use the 12 features that we extracted
using Deconvolution can significantly improve the accuracy with
maximum 85% (Decision algorithm) with 89% sensitivity and 90%
specificity. Finally, if we use the 14 features (including context) can
significantly improve the accuracy with maximum 93% (Decision
algorithm) with 96% sensitivity and 96% specificity. Decision Tree
algorithm outperforms other algorithms significantly.
Power Consumption Analysis: We implemented our proposed
deconvolution based feature extraction method and 5 different algo-
rithms in Java Android platform. We ran each of the algorithm on
real-time streamed data for 5 hours in Android platform. We found
that (Table 1), Naive Bayes algorithm is the least power consuming
algorithm (98%, 97% and 95% battery power left using raw EDA
signal, deconvolution resultant features respectively and including
HotMobile ’21, February 24–26, 2021, Virtual, United Kingdom
contexts) while Decision Tree (most accurate one) still provides
very descent power consumption (95%, 94% and 93% battery power
left for same).
Explanation via Activity Summary: The purpose of activity
recognition is to provide a summary of daily activities of users
regarding 4 postural activities and drinking behaviors. The sum-
mary of statistics is extremely important for a person to maintain
hydration level. While, our developed Android application provides
hydration alert, it is designed to provide a summary of activities as
well. The summary of activities includes, "total duration (minutes)
of walking, sitting, standing and lying" and "number of drinking
water incidents".
User Experience Study: After development of initial classifica-
tion model and deployment in the Android platform, 5 users were
given the Empatica E4 device along with alert system for user feed-
back. We found that, all 5 of the users provided us 100% satisfaction
with feedback provided. 4 of the users reported that their number
of drinking water incident has an error rate of ±1 and 3 of them
thought they have performed more walking activities than reported
summaries.
4 CONCLUSION
Electrodermal Activity shows promise in being used to detect hydra-
tion levels of subjects given the correct proportion of data varying
over numerous subjects. The device has potential to be used in a
completely non-invasive and easy-to-deploy way, unlike current
methods of determining hydration level. We have successfully im-
plemented an application that reads data from an Empatica E4,
uses it to calculate a subject’s hydration level, and reports it to the
subject in the application.
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