Past, Present, and Future of Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Wearables: A Surveying Tutorial on a Still Challenging Task

View a PDF of the paper titled Past, Present, and Future of Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Wearables: A Surveying Tutorial on a Still Challenging Task, by Harish Haresamudram and 4 other authors

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Abstract:In the many years since the inception of wearable sensor-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR), a wide variety of methods have been introduced and evaluated for their ability to recognize activities. Substantial gains have been made since the days of hand-crafting heuristics as features, yet, progress has seemingly stalled on many popular benchmarks, with performance falling short of what may be considered ‘sufficient’– despite the increase in computational power and scale of sensor data, as well as rising complexity in techniques being employed. The HAR community approaches a new paradigm shift, this time incorporating world knowledge from foundational models. In this paper, we take stock of sensor-based HAR — surveying it from its beginnings to the current state of the field, and charting its future. This is accompanied by a hands-on tutorial, through which we guide practitioners in developing HAR systems for real-world application scenarios. We provide a compendium for novices and experts alike, of methods that aim at finally solving the activity recognition problem.