IoT Wearable Sensor and Deep Learning: an Integrated Approach for Personalized Human Activity Recognition in a Smart Home Environment

Human activity recognition (HAR) is currently recognized as a key element of a more general framework designed to perform continuous monitoring of human behaviors in the area of ambient assisted living (AAL), well-being management, medical diagnosis, elderly care, rehabilitation, entertainment, and surveillance in smart home environments. In this paper, an innovative HAR system, exploiting the potential of wearable devices integrated with the skills of deep learning techniques, is presented with the aim of recognizing the most common daily activities of a person at home. The designed wearable sensor embeds an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a Wi-Fi section to send data on a cloud service and to allow direct connection to the Internet through a common home router so that the user themselves could manage the installation procedure. The sensor is coupled to a convolutional neural network (CNN) network designed to make inferences with the minimum possible resources to keep open the way of its implementation on low-cost or embedded devices. The system is conceived for daily activity monitor and nine different activities can be highlighted with an accuracy of 97%.