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arXiv · 2411.14452

Past, Present, and Future of Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Wearables: A Surveying Tutorial on a Still Challenging Task

Harish Haresamudram·Chi Ian Tang·Sungho Suh·Paul Lukowicz·Thomas Ploetz
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Abstract

In the many years since the inception of wearable sensor-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR), a wide variety of methods have been introduced and evaluated for their ability to recognize activities. Substantial gains have been made since the days of hand-crafting heuristics as features, yet, progress has seemingly stalled on many popular benchmarks, with performance falling short of what may be considered 'sufficient'-- despite the increase in computational power and scale of sensor data, as well as rising complexity in techniques being employed. The HAR community approaches a new paradigm shift, this time incorporating world knowledge from foundational models. In this paper, we take stock of sensor-based HAR -- surveying it from its beginnings to the current state of the field, and charting its future. This is accompanied by a hands-on tutorial, through which we guide practitioners in developing HAR systems for real-world application scenarios. We provide a compendium for novices and experts alike, of methods that aim at finally solving the activity recognition problem.

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Harish Haresamudram, Chi Ian Tang, Sungho Suh, Paul Lukowicz, Thomas Ploetz. 2024-11-11. Past, Present, and Future of Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Wearables: A Surveying Tutorial on a Still Challenging Task. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14452

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