In this paper, we are concerned with accelerometer-based Activity Recognition (AR).

Firstly,
we need to clarify the difference between activity tracking and activity recognition: whereas
the former is only concerned with estimating general levels of activity the latter is
attempting to determine the actual activities which are occurring. Hereby we discuss only
the activity recognition using the tri-axial accelerometers providing a high-fidelity
measurement of force along the x, y, and z-axes and thus provide a view into the movement
of the person wearing the device. Although there is significant potential for accurately
predicting activities of the daily routine with accelerometers, many open problems exist due
to the sheer volume of reasonable configurations available. Accelerometers may, for
example, be configured with specific sampling rates, sample resolution and accelerometer
range, where features can be extracted from windows of any size, and the selection of the
ultimate data analysis and classification pipeline is also non-trivial. Different configurations
may have an impact on the predictive performance of an AR classifier, and so these
parameters must be carefully chosen.
To build a classifier for wearable accelerometer data, we need to first collect the data from
wearable sensors placed on the body of the subject on the hips (belt), upper arms, wrists,
ankles, and thighs.
The results which considered locations of the above suggested that multiple accelerometers
aided in recognition since connections between acceleration feature values at different sites
were useful for specifying many activities. However, with just two triaxial accelerometers–
thigh and wrist–the recognition performance dropped only slightly.
Rather than attempt to classify every single data point it made sense to compute features of
the data that are based on some kind of temporal window. The longer the window length,
the more these positive benefits are obtained; however if the window length becomes too
large, the probability that a given window contains more than one activity is increased, the
delay is increased, and the number of training examples for the classifier will also be
decreased.
We have considered advanced neural network based models for AR with CNNs and also
investigated the benefit of convolutions and recurrency for feature learning and prediction.
Two popular methods of incorporating recurrency in Deep Neural Networks include LSTM
and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). These two techniques achieve tremendous performance
on sequence prediction tasks since they directly parameterize the influence of nearby data
points on predicting the current time point, likely to Markov Models and the neighborhood
of influence is optimized during the learning phase.
The LSTM configuration is chosen since a complete analysis of CNNs and LSTMs over all
sensor configurations would command particular care in specifying the network
architectures.