Deep Learning Models for Real-time Human Activity Recognition with Smartphones

With the widespread application of mobile edge computing (MEC), MEC is serving as a bridge to narrow the gaps between medical staff and patients. Relatedly, MEC is also moving toward supervising individual health in an automatic and intelligent manner. One of the main MEC technologies in healthcare monitoring systems is human activity recognition (HAR). Built-in multifunctional sensors make smartphones a ubiquitous platform for acquiring and analyzing data, thus making it possible for smartphones to perform HAR. The task of recognizing human activity using a smartphone’s built-in accelerometer has been well resolved, but in practice, with the multimodal and high-dimensional sensor data, these traditional methods fail to identify complicated and real-time human activities. This paper designs a smartphone inertial accelerometer-based architecture for HAR. When the participants perform typical daily activities, the smartphone collects the sensory data sequence, extracts the high-efficiency features from the original data, and then obtains the user’s physical behavior data through multiple three-axis accelerometers. The data are preprocessed by denoising, normalization and segmentation to extract valuable feature vectors. In addition, a real-time human activity classification method based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed, which uses a CNN for local feature extraction. Finally, CNN, LSTM, BLSTM, MLP and SVM models are utilized on the UCI and Pamap2 datasets. We explore how to train deep learning methods and demonstrate how the proposed method outperforms the others on two large public datasets: UCI and Pamap2.