From Lab to Real World: Assessing the Effectiveness of Human Activity Recognition and Optimization through Personalization

Human activity recognition (HAR) algorithms today are designed and evaluated on data collected in controlled settings, providing limited insights into their performance in real-world situations with noisy and missing sensor data and natural human activities. We present a real-world HAR open dataset compiled from a wristband equipped with a triaxial accelerometer. During data collection, participants had autonomy in their daily life activities, and the process remained unobserved and uncontrolled. A general convolutional neural network model was trained on this dataset, achieving a mean balanced accuracy (MBA) of 80%. Personalizing the general model through transfer learning can yield comparable and even superior results using fewer data, with the MBA improving to 85%. To emphasize the issue of insufficient real-world training data, we conducted training of the model using the public MHEALTH dataset, resulting in 100% MBA. However, upon evaluating the MHEALTH-trained model on our real-world dataset, the MBA drops to 62%. After personalizing the model with real-world data, an improvement of 17% in the MBA is achieved. This paper showcases the potential of transfer learning to make HAR models trained in different contexts (lab vs. real-world) and on different participants perform well for new individuals with limited real-world labeled data available.