w-HAR: An Activity Recognition Dataset and Framework Using Low-Power Wearable Devices

Human activity recognition (HAR) is growing in popularity due to its wide-ranging applications in patient rehabilitation and movement disorders. HAR approaches typically start with collecting sensor data for the activities under consideration and then develop algorithms using the dataset. As such, the success of algorithms for HAR depends on the availability and quality of datasets. Most of the existing work on HAR uses data from inertial sensors on wearable devices or smartphones to design HAR algorithms. However, inertial sensors exhibit high noise that makes it difficult to segment the data and classify the activities. Furthermore, existing approaches typically do not make their data available publicly, which makes it difficult or impossible to obtain comparisons of HAR approaches. To address these issues, we present wearable HAR (w-HAR) which contains labeled data of seven activities from 22 users. Our dataset’s unique aspect is the integration of data from inertial and wearable stretch sensors, thus providing two modalities of activity information. The wearable stretch sensor data allows us to create variable-length segment data and ensure that each segment contains a single activity. We also provide a HAR framework to use w-HAR to classify the activities. To this end, we first perform a design space exploration to choose a neural network architecture for activity classification. Then, we use two online learning algorithms to adapt the classifier to users whose data are not included at design time. Experiments on the w-HAR dataset show that our framework achieves 95% accuracy while the online learning algorithms improve the accuracy by as much as 40%.