An efficient deep learning-based approach for human activity recognition using smartphone inertial sensors

Human activity recognition (HAR) has recently witnessed outstanding growth in health and entertainment applications. Owing to the availability of smartphones, many new methods and protocols for using the data from smartphones’ embedded sensors are emerging. Nonetheless, the methods carried out and published in the literature leave a wide area for improvement, in terms of accuracy, resource economy, and adaptation to real-world nuisances. On top of that, a novel classification method that is more economical and efficient is proposed in this paper using both 1D convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) parameters and handcrafted temporal and frequency features with the proficiency of a multilayer perceptron neural network (MLP) classifier. The method proposed requires only tri-axial accelerometer data, allowing it to be deployed even into lower equipment devices; it was tested within the two well-known benchmark datasets: UCI-HAR and Uni-MIB SHAR. Experimental results yield a classification accuracy exceeding 99%, outperforming many of the methods recently shown in the literature.