Past, Present, and Future of Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Wearables: A Surveying Tutorial on a Still Challenging Task
This is a surveying tutorial that addresses the still challenging problem of activity recognition for researchers and practitioners in the HAR community.
The paper surveys the evolution of sensor-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR) from its origins to current methods, noting that progress has stalled on benchmarks despite advances in data and techniques, and it includes a tutorial to guide practitioners in developing real-world HAR systems.
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.