Human activity recognition: A comprehensive review

Abstract

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a highly promising research area meant to automatically identify and interpret human behaviour using data received from sensors in various contexts. The potential uses of HAR are many, among them health care, sports coaching or monitoring the elderly or disabled. Nonetheless, there are numerous hurdles to be circumvented for HAR's precision and usefulness to be improved. One of the challenges is that there is no uniformity in data collection and annotation making it difficult to compare findings among different studies. Furthermore, more comprehensive datasets are necessary so as to include a wider range of human activities in different contexts while complex activities, which consist of multiple sub‐activities, are still a challenge for recognition systems. Researchers have proposed new frontiers such as multi‐modal sensor data fusion and deep learning approaches for enhancing HAR accuracy while addressing these issues. Also, we are seeing more non‐traditional applications such as robotics and virtual reality/augmented world going forward with their use cases of HAR. This article offers an extensive review on the recent advances in HAR and highlights the major challenges facing this field as well as future opportunities for further researches.