Recognition of everyday activities using experiment data from wearable sensors: a deep learning-based framework

Abstract

Tracking everyday activities is vital for detecting changes in older adults’ health, allowing timely support to promote well-being. Wearable sensors and deep learning provide continuous monitoring, making them a supportive tool in detecting such changes. However, a more refined method is needed to recognise precise activities with a minimal set of sensors. This study aimed to develop a method to recognise everyday activities among older adults by utilising wearable sensors and a deep learning model. This is a small-scale home lab experiment to develop a method to recognise 14 everyday activities. We compared five models that recognised everyday activities with different sensor signal counts and accuracy. Our results showed that sensor placement is important. Based on the results, we proposed a two-sensor method (pelvis and right hand) to collect and correctly recognise everyday activities among older adults. This model, which utilises two sensors, classified 12 activities with an accuracy of 89.3%. Another model recognised all 14 activities with a lower accuracy of 88.2% using five sensors. We also explored a one-sensor approach, which showed low recognition performance and struggled to distinguish activity variability. The two-sensor-based system will allow for large-scale data collection on everyday activities of older adults.