Viveka: Context-Aware Sensing for Energy Efficiency in Smart Wearables

Abstract

The proliferation of multi-sensor Internet of Things (IoT) systems, from Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) to industrial monitoring, is increasingly constrained by strict energy budgets and limited on-device storage. Continuous high-fidelity sensing leads to rapid battery depletion and data gaps that compromise application reliability. Existing strategies address this through sensor selection or adaptive sampling in isolation, or rely on computationally expensive agents for joint optimization. They lack context granularity or introduce significant overhead, and critically, they do not account for the risk that an aggressive, context-specific sensing policy applied to a misidentified context degrades accuracy. In this paper, we formulate joint sensor and sampling-rate selection as an NP-hard energy-minimization problem and propose Viveka, a lightweight, context-aware framework. Viveka couples a cheap, always-on controller that estimates context and how much to trust that estimate with a stability and confidence gated policy that applies an aggressive per-context configuration only when context is certain, and falls back safely otherwise. Per-context configurations are instantiated using permutation feature importance and spectral energy analysis. Evaluation on the MHEALTH and PAMAP2 datasets shows that Viveka achieves up to 75% energy savings and 78% data reduction over standard baselines in a best-case configuration, while maintaining classification accuracy within 3-5% of the baselines.