GARSAaaS: group activity recognition and situation analysis as a service

Human activity recognition using embedded mobile and embedded sensors is becoming increasingly important. Scaling up from individuals to groups, that is, group activity recognition, has attracted significant attention recently. This paper proposes a model and specification language for group activities called GroupSense-L, and a novel architecture called GARSAaaS (GARSA-as-a-Service) to provide services for mobile Group Activity Recognition and Situation Analysis (or GARSA) applications. We implemented and evaluated GARSAaaS which is an extension of a framework called GroupSense (Abkenar et al., 2016 IEEE 30th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA), 2016) where sensor data, collected using smartphone sensors, smartwatch sensors and embedded sensors in things, are aggregated via a protocol for these different devices to share information, as required for GARSA. We illustrate our approach via a scenario for providing services for bush walking leaders and bush walkers in a bushwalking group activity. We demonstrate the feasibility of our model and expressiveness of our proposed model.