Deep Incremental Learning for Personalized Human Activity Recognition on Edge Devices

Tracking human daily activities is a useful functionality supported in many applications, especially with the pervasive use of wearable devices. State-of-the-art human activity recognition (HAR) uses machine or deep learning techniques to identify activities based on sensor readings. However, these models represent patterns from standardized experiment setups, with limited diversity when it comes to the individuals involved in data collection. This leads to limited success of HAR in real deployment scenarios, where individuals perform the same activity in different ways. Training models from scratch on real-time data streams is challenging due to the computational complexity of machine and deep learning architectures. In this article, we propose an incremental learning model for HAR that tweaks a deep learning model pretrained on a standardized HAR dataset and incrementally trains on newly generated individuals personalized data on their personal devices. The proposed solution promotes the preservation of data privacy, improves the model performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency without having to retrain from scratch, and tweaks the model according to personalized activity patterns. Extensive experiments show improvement of the base model’s accuracy up to 19% after incrementally training the model on filtered users’ datasets for the standing, walking, and running activities.