An overview of human activity recognition based on smartphone

Abstract

Purpose

Currently, ubiquitous smartphones embedded with various sensors provide a convenient way to collect raw sequence data. These data bridges the gap between human activity and multiple sensors. Human activity recognition has been widely used in quite a lot of aspects in our daily life, such as medical security, personal safety, living assistance and so on.

Design/methodology/approach

To provide an overview, the authors survey and summarize some important technologies and involved key issues of human activity recognition, including activity categorization, feature engineering as well as typical algorithms presented in recent years. In this paper, the authors first introduce the character of embedded sensors and dsiscuss their features, as well as survey some data labeling strategies to get ground truth label. Then, following the process of human activity recognition, the authors discuss the methods and techniques of raw data preprocessing and feature extraction, and summarize some popular algorithms used in model training and activity recognizing. Third, they introduce some interesting application scenarios of human activity recognition and provide some available data sets as ground truth data to validate proposed algorithms.

Findings

The authors summarize their viewpoints on human activity recognition, discuss the main challenges and point out some potential research directions.

Originality/value

It is hoped that this work will serve as the steppingstone for those interested in advancing human activity recognition.

Citation

Yuan, G., Wang, Z., Meng, F., Yan, Q. and Xia, S. (2019), "An overview of human activity recognition based on smartphone", Sensor Review, Vol. 39 No. 2, pp. 288-306. https://doi.org/10.1108/SR-11-2017-0245