Deep learning algorithms for human activity recognition using mobile and wearable sensor networks: State of the art and research challenges

Abstract Human activity recognition systems are developed as part of a framework to enable continuous monitoring of human behaviours in the area of ambient assisted living, sports injury detection, elderly care, rehabilitation, and entertainment and surveillance in smart home environments. The extraction of relevant features is the most challenging part of the mobile and wearable sensor-based human activity recognition pipeline. Feature extraction influences the algorithm performance and reduces computation time and complexity. However, current human activity recognition relies on handcrafted features that are incapable of handling complex activities especially with the current influx of multimodal and high dimensional sensor data. With the emergence of deep learning and increased computation powers, deep learning and artificial intelligence methods are being adopted for automatic feature learning in diverse areas like health, image classification, and recently, for feature extraction and classification of simple and complex human activity recognition in mobile and wearable sensors. Furthermore, the fusion of mobile or wearable sensors and deep learning methods for feature learning provide diversity, offers higher generalisation, and tackles challenging issues in human activity recognition. The focus of this review is to provide in-depth summaries of deep learning methods for mobile and wearable sensor-based human activity recognition. The review presents the methods, uniqueness, advantages and their limitations. We not only categorise the studies into generative, discriminative and hybrid methods but also highlight their important advantages. Furthermore, the review presents classification and evaluation procedures and discusses publicly available datasets for mobile sensor human activity recognition. Finally, we outline and explain some challenges to open research problems that require further research and improvements.