A Review on Assisted Living Using Wearable Devices

Forecasts about the aging trend of the world population agree on identifying increased life expectancy as a serious risk factor for the financial sustainability of social healthcare systems if not properly supported by innovative care management policies. Such policies should include the integration within traditional healthcare services of assistive technologies as tools for prolonging healthy and independent living at home, but also for introducing innovations in clinical practice such as long-term and remote health monitoring. For their part, solutions for active and assisted living have now reached a high degree of technological maturity, thanks to the considerable amount of research work carried out in recent years to develop highly reliable and energy-efficient wearable sensors capable of enabling the development of systems to monitor activity and physiological parameters over time, and in a minimally invasive manner. This work reviews the role of wearable sensors in the design and development of assisted living solutions, focusing on human activity recognition by joint use of onboard electromyography sensors and inertial measurement units and on the acquisition of parameters related to overall physical and psychological conditions, such as heart activity and skin conductance.

Human Multi-Activities Classification Using mmWave Radar: Feature Fusion in Time-Domain and PCANet

This study introduces an innovative approach by incorporating statistical offset features, range profiles, time-frequency analyses, and azimuth-range-time characteristics to effectively identify various human daily activities. Our technique utilizes nine feature vectors consisting of six statistical offset features and three principal component analysis network (PCANet) fusion attributes. These statistical offset features are derived from combined elevation and azimuth data, considering their spatial angle relationships. The fusion attributes are generated through concurrent 1D networks using CNN-BiLSTM. The process begins with the temporal fusion of 3D range-azimuth-time data, followed by PCANet integration. Subsequently, a conventional classification model is employed to categorize a range of actions. Our methodology was tested with 21,000 samples across fourteen categories of human daily activities, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed solution. The experimental outcomes highlight the superior robustness of our method, particularly when using the Margenau-Hill Spectrogram for time-frequency analysis. When employing a random forest classifier, our approach outperformed other classifiers in terms of classification efficacy, achieving an average sensitivity, precision, F1, specificity, and accuracy of 98.25%, 98.25%, 98.25%, 99.87%, and 99.75%, respectively.

Wearable sensors based on artificial intelligence models for human activity recognition

Human motion detection technology holds significant potential in medicine, health care, and physical exercise. This study introduces a novel approach to human activity recognition (HAR) using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) designed for individual sensor types to enhance the accuracy and address the challenge of diverse data shapes from accelerometers, gyroscopes, and barometers. Specific CNN models are constructed for each sensor type, enabling them to capture the characteristics of their respective sensors. These adapted CNNs are designed to effectively process varying data shapes and sensor-specific characteristics to accurately classify a wide range of human activities. The late-fusion technique is employed to combine predictions from various models to obtain comprehensive estimates of human activity. The proposed CNN-based approach is compared to a standard support vector machine (SVM) classifier using the one-vs-rest methodology. The late-fusion CNN model showed significantly improved performance, with validation and final test accuracies of 99.35 and 94.83% compared to the conventional SVM classifier at 87.07 and 83.10%, respectively. These findings provide strong evidence that combining multiple sensors and a barometer and utilizing an additional filter algorithm greatly improves the accuracy of identifying different human movement patterns.

A hybrid deep approach to recognizing student activity and monitoring health physique based on accelerometer data from smartphones

Smartphone sensors have gained considerable traction in Human Activity Recognition (HAR), drawing attention for their diverse applications. Accelerometer data monitoring holds promise in understanding students' physical activities, fostering healthier lifestyles. This technology tracks exercise routines, sedentary behavior, and overall fitness levels, potentially encouraging better habits, preempting health issues, and bolstering students' well-being. Traditionally, HAR involved analyzing signals linked to physical activities using handcrafted features. However, recent years have witnessed the integration of deep learning into HAR tasks, leveraging digital physiological signals from smartwatches and learning features automatically from raw sensory data. The Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network stands out as a potent algorithm for analyzing physiological signals, promising improved accuracy and scalability in automated signal analysis. In this article, we propose a feature analysis framework for recognizing student activity and monitoring health based on smartphone accelerometer data through an edge computing platform. Our objective is to boost HAR performance by accounting for the dynamic nature of human behavior. Nonetheless, the current LSTM network's presetting of hidden units and initial learning rate relies on prior knowledge, potentially leading to suboptimal states. To counter this, we employ Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), enhancing sequence processing models. Furthermore, Bayesian optimization aids in fine-tuning the BiLSTM model architecture. Through fivefold cross-validation on training and testing datasets, our model showcases a classification accuracy of 97.5% on the tested dataset. Moreover, edge computing offers real-time processing, reduced latency, enhanced privacy, bandwidth efficiency, offline capabilities, energy efficiency, personalization, and scalability. Extensive experimental results validate that our proposed approach surpasses state-of-the-art methodologies in recognizing human activities and monitoring health based on smartphone accelerometer data.

An improved human activity recognition technique based on convolutional neural network

A convolutional neural network (CNN) is an important and widely utilized part of the artificial neural network (ANN) for computer vision, mostly used in the pattern recognition system. The most important applications of CNN are medical image analysis, image classification, object recognition from videos, recommender systems, financial time series analysis, natural language processing, and human-computer interfaces. However, after the technological advancement in the power of computing ability and the emergence of huge quantities of labeled data provided through enhanced algorithms, nowadays, CNN is widely used in almost every area of study. One of the main uses of wearable technology and CNN within medical surveillance is human activity recognition (HAR), which must require constant tracking of everyday activities. This paper provides a comprehensive study of the application of CNNs in the classification of HAR tasks. We describe their enhancement, from their antecedents up to the current state-of-the-art systems of deep learning (DL). We have provided a comprehensive working principle of CNN for HAR tasks, and a CNN-based model is presented to perform the classification of human activities. The proposed technique interprets data from sensor sequences of inputs by using a multi-layered CNN that gathers temporal and spatial data related to human activities. The publicly available WISDM dataset for HAR has been used to perform this study. This proposed study uses the two-dimensional CNN approach to make a model for the classification of different human activities. A recent version of Python software has been used to perform the study. The rate of accuracy for HAR through the proposed model in this experiment is 97.20%, which is better than the previously estimated state-of-the-art technique. The findings of the study imply that using DL methods for activity recognition might greatly increase accuracy and increase the range of applications where HAR can be used successfully. We have also described the future research trends in the field of HAR in this article.

Ambient assisted living for frail people through human activity recognition: state-of-the-art, challenges and future directions

Ambient Assisted Living is a concept that focuses on using technology to support and enhance the quality of life and well-being of frail or elderly individuals in both indoor and outdoor environments. It aims at empowering individuals to maintain their independence and autonomy while ensuring their safety and providing assistance when needed. Human Activity Recognition is widely regarded as the most popular methodology within the field of Ambient Assisted Living. Human Activity Recognition involves automatically detecting and classifying the activities performed by individuals using sensor-based systems. Researchers have employed various methodologies, utilizing wearable and/or non-wearable sensors, and employing algorithms ranging from simple threshold-based techniques to more advanced deep learning approaches. In this review, literature from the past decade is critically examined, specifically exploring the technological aspects of Human Activity Recognition in Ambient Assisted Living. An exhaustive analysis of the methodologies adopted, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses is provided. Finally, challenges encountered in the field of Human Activity Recognition for Ambient Assisted Living are thoroughly discussed. These challenges encompass issues related to data collection, model training, real-time performance, generalizability, and user acceptance. Miniaturization, unobtrusiveness, energy harvesting and communication efficiency will be the crucial factors for new wearable solutions.

Human Activity Prediction Based on Forecasted IMU Activity Signals by Sequence-to-Sequence Deep Neural Networks

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has gained significant attention due to its broad range of applications, such as healthcare, industrial work safety, activity assistance, and driver monitoring. Most prior HAR systems are based on recorded sensor data (i.e., past information) recognizing human activities. In fact, HAR works based on future sensor data to predict human activities are rare. Human Activity Prediction (HAP) can benefit in multiple applications, such as fall detection or exercise routines, to prevent injuries. This work presents a novel HAP system based on forecasted activity data of Inertial Measurement Units (IMU). Our HAP system consists of a deep learning forecaster of IMU activity signals and a deep learning classifier to recognize future activities. Our deep learning forecaster model is based on a Sequence-to-Sequence structure with attention and positional encoding layers. Then, a pre-trained deep learning Bi-LSTM classifier is used to classify future activities based on the forecasted IMU data. We have tested our HAP system for five daily activities with two tri-axial IMU sensors. The forecasted signals show an average correlation of 91.6% to the actual measured signals of the five activities. The proposed HAP system achieves an average accuracy of 97.96% in predicting future activities.

Artificial Intelligence Based Approach for Classification of Human Activities Using MEMS Sensors Data

The integration of Micro Electronic Mechanical Systems (MEMS) sensor technology in smartphones has greatly improved the capability for Human Activity Recognition (HAR). By utilizing Machine Learning (ML) techniques and data from these sensors, various human motion activities can be classified. This study performed experiments and compiled a large dataset of nine daily activities, including Laying Down, Stationary, Walking, Brisk Walking, Running, Stairs-Up, Stairs-Down, Squatting, and Cycling. Several ML models, such as Decision Tree Classifier, Random Forest Classifier, K Neighbors Classifier, Multinomial Logistic Regression, Gaussian Naive Bayes, and Support Vector Machine, were trained on sensor data collected from accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer embedded in smartphones and wearable devices. The highest test accuracy of 95% was achieved using the random forest algorithm. Additionally, a custom-built Bidirectional Long-Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) model, a type of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), was proposed and yielded an improved test accuracy of 98.1%. This approach differs from traditional algorithmic-based human activity detection used in current wearable technologies, resulting in improved accuracy.

Matched Filter Interpretation of CNN Classifiers with Application to HAR

Time series classification is an active research topic due to its wide range of applications and the proliferation of sensory data. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are ubiquitous in modern machine learning (ML) models. In this work, we present a matched filter (MF) interpretation of CNN classifiers accompanied by an experimental proof of concept using a carefully developed synthetic dataset. We exploit this interpretation to develop an MF CNN model for time series classification comprising a stack of a Conv1D layer followed by a GlobalMaxPooling layer acting as a typical MF for automated feature extraction and a fully connected layer with softmax activation for computing class probabilities. The presented interpretation enables developing superlight highly accurate classifier models that meet the tight requirements of edge inference. Edge inference is emerging research that addresses the latency, availability, privacy, and connectivity concerns of the commonly deployed cloud inference. The MF-based CNN model has been applied to the sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) problem due to its significant importance in a broad range of applications. The UCI-HAR, WISDM-AR, and MotionSense datasets are used for model training and testing. The proposed classifier is tested and benchmarked on an android smartphone with average accuracy and F1 scores of 98% and 97%, respectively, which outperforms state-of-the-art HAR methods in terms of classification accuracy and run-time performance. The proposed model size is less than 150 KB, and the average inference time is less than 1 ms. The presented interpretation helps develop a better understanding of CNN operation and decision mechanisms. The proposed model is distinguished from related work by jointly featuring interpretability, high accuracy, and low computational cost, enabling its ready deployment on a wide set of mobile devices for a broad range of applications.

Human Activity Recognition: Review, Taxonomy and Open Challenges

Nowadays, Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is being widely used in a variety of domains, and vision and sensor-based data enable cutting-edge technologies to detect, recognize, and monitor human activities. Several reviews and surveys on HAR have already been published, but due to the constantly growing literature, the status of HAR literature needed to be updated. Hence, this review aims to provide insights on the current state of the literature on HAR published since 2018. The ninety-five articles reviewed in this study are classified to highlight application areas, data sources, techniques, and open research challenges in HAR. The majority of existing research appears to have concentrated on daily living activities, followed by user activities based on individual and group-based activities. However, there is little literature on detecting real-time activities such as suspicious activity, surveillance, and healthcare. A major portion of existing studies has used Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) videos and Mobile Sensors data. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long short-term memory (LSTM), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) are the most prominent techniques in the literature reviewed that are being utilized for the task of HAR. Lastly, the limitations and open challenges that needed to be addressed are discussed.