Text me the data: Generating Ground Pressure Sequence from Textual Descriptions for HAR

In human activity recognition (HAR), the availability of substantial ground truth is necessary for training efficient models. However, acquiring ground pressure data through physical sensors itself can be cost-prohibitive, time-consuming. To address this critical need, we introduce Text-to-Pressure (T2P), a framework designed to generate extensive ground pressure sequences from textual descriptions of human activities using deep learning techniques. We show that the combination of vector quantization of sensor data along with simple text conditioned auto regressive strategy allows us to obtain high-quality generated pressure sequences from textual descriptions with the help of discrete latent correlation between text and pressure maps. We achieved comparable performance on the consistency between text and generated motion with an R squared value of 0.722, Masked R squared value of 0.892, and FID score of 1.83. Additionally, we trained a HAR model with the the synthesized data and evaluated it on pressure dynamics collected by a real pressure sensor which is on par with a model trained on only real data. Combining both real and synthesized training data increases the overall macro F1 score by 5.9 percent.

Contrastive Left-Right Wearable Sensors (IMUs) Consistency Matching for HAR

Machine learning algorithms are improving rapidly, but annotating training data remains a bottleneck for many applications. In this paper, we show how real data can be used for self-supervised learning without any transformations by taking advantage of the symmetry present in the activities. Our approach involves contrastive matching of two different sensors (left and right wrist or leg-worn IMUs) to make representations of co-occurring sensor data more similar and those of non-co-occurring sensor data more different. We test our approach on the Opportunity and MM-Fit datasets. In MM-Fit we show significant improvement over the baseline supervised and self-supervised method SimCLR, while for Opportunity there is significant improvement over the supervised baseline and slight improvement when compared to SimCLR. Moreover, our method improves supervised baselines even when using only a small amount of the data for training. Future work should explore under which conditions our method is beneficial for human activity recognition systems and other related applications.

Worker Activity Recognition in Manufacturing Line Using Near-body Electric Field

Manufacturing industries strive to improve production efficiency and product quality by deploying advanced sensing and control systems. Wearable sensors are emerging as a promising solution for achieving this goal, as they can provide continuous and unobtrusive monitoring of workers' activities in the manufacturing line. This paper presents a novel wearable sensing prototype that combines IMU and body capacitance sensing modules to recognize worker activities in the manufacturing line. To handle these multimodal sensor data, we propose and compare early, and late sensor data fusion approaches for multi-channel time-series convolutional neural networks and deep convolutional LSTM. We evaluate the proposed hardware and neural network model by collecting and annotating sensor data using the proposed sensing prototype and Apple Watches in the testbed of the manufacturing line. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve superior performance compared to the baseline methods, indicating the potential of the proposed approach for real-world applications in manufacturing industries. Furthermore, the proposed sensing prototype with a body capacitive sensor and feature fusion method improves by 6.35%, yielding a 9.38% higher macro F1 score than the proposed sensing prototype without a body capacitive sensor and Apple Watch data, respectively.

PressureTransferNet: Human Attribute Guided Dynamic Ground Pressure Profile Transfer using 3D simulated Pressure Maps

We propose PressureTransferNet, a novel method for Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using ground pressure information. Our approach generates body-specific dynamic ground pressure profiles for specific activities by leveraging existing pressure data from different individuals. PressureTransferNet is an encoder-decoder model taking a source pressure map and a target human attribute vector as inputs, producing a new pressure map reflecting the target attribute. To train the model, we use a sensor simulation to create a diverse dataset with various human attributes and pressure profiles. Evaluation on a real-world dataset shows its effectiveness in accurately transferring human attributes to ground pressure profiles across different scenarios. We visually confirm the fidelity of the synthesized pressure shapes using a physics-based deep learning model and achieve a binary R-square value of 0.79 on areas with ground contact. Validation through classification with F1 score (0.911$\pm$0.015) on physical pressure mat data demonstrates the correctness of the synthesized pressure maps, making our method valuable for data augmentation, denoising, sensor simulation, and anomaly detection. Applications span sports science, rehabilitation, and bio-mechanics, contributing to the development of HAR systems.

Don't freeze: Finetune encoders for better Self-Supervised HAR

Recently self-supervised learning has been proposed in the field of human activity recognition as a solution to the labelled data availability problem. The idea being that by using pretext tasks such as reconstruction or contrastive predictive coding, useful representations can be learned that then can be used for classification. Those approaches follow the pretrain, freeze and fine-tune procedure. In this paper we will show how a simple change - not freezing the representation - leads to substantial performance gains across pretext tasks. The improvement was found in all four investigated datasets and across all four pretext tasks and is inversely proportional to amount of labelled data. Moreover the effect is present whether the pretext task is carried on the Capture24 dataset or directly in unlabelled data of the target dataset.

Unsupervised Statistical Feature-Guided Diffusion Model for Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition

Recognizing human activities from sensor data is a vital task in various domains, but obtaining diverse and labeled sensor data remains challenging and costly. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised statistical feature-guided diffusion model for sensor-based human activity recognition. The proposed method aims to generate synthetic time-series sensor data without relying on labeled data, addressing the scarcity and annotation difficulties associated with real-world sensor data. By conditioning the diffusion model on statistical information such as mean, standard deviation, Z-score, and skewness, we generate diverse and representative synthetic sensor data. We conducted experiments on public human activity recognition datasets and compared the proposed method to conventional oversampling methods and state-of-the-art generative adversarial network methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the performance of human activity recognition and outperform existing techniques.

FieldHAR: A Fully Integrated End-to-end RTL Framework for Human Activity Recognition with Neural Networks from Heterogeneous Sensors

In this work, we propose an open-source scalable end-to-end RTL framework FieldHAR, for complex human activity recognition (HAR) from heterogeneous sensors using artificial neural networks (ANN) optimized for FPGA or ASIC integration. FieldHAR aims to address the lack of apparatus to transform complex HAR methodologies often limited to offline evaluation to efficient run-time edge applications. The framework uses parallel sensor interfaces and integer-based multi-branch convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to support flexible modality extensions with synchronous sampling at the maximum rate of each sensor. To validate the framework, we used a sensor-rich kitchen scenario HAR application which was demonstrated in a previous offline study. Through resource-aware optimizations, with FieldHAR the entire RTL solution was created from data acquisition to ANN inference taking as low as 25\% logic elements and 2\% memory bits of a low-end Cyclone IV FPGA and less than 1\% accuracy loss from the original FP32 precision offline study. The RTL implementation also shows advantages over MCU-based solutions, including superior data acquisition performance and virtually eliminating ANN inference bottleneck.

The Contribution of Human Body Capacitance/Body-Area Electric Field To Individual and Collaborative Activity Recognition

The current dominated wearable body motion sensor is IMU. This work presented an alternative wearable motion-sensing approach: human body capacitance (HBC, also commonly defined as body-area electric field). While being less robust in tracking the posture and trajectory, HBC has two properties that make it an attractive. First, the deployment of the sensing node on the being tracked body part is not a requirement for HBC sensing approach. Second, HBC is sensitive to the body's interaction with its surroundings, including both touching and being in the immediate proximity of people and objects. We first described the sensing principle for HBC, sensor architecture and implementation, and methods for evaluation. We then presented two case studies demonstrating the usefulness of HBC as a complement/alternative to IMUs. First, we explored the exercise recognition and repetition counting of seven machine-free leg-only exercises and eleven general gym workouts with the signal source of HBC and IMU. The HBC sensing shows significant advantages over the IMU signals in classification(0.89 vs 0.78 in F-score) and counting(0.982 vs 0.938 in accuracy) of the leg-only exercises. For the general gym workouts, HBC only shows recognition improvement for certain workouts like adductor where legs alone complete the movement. And it also supplies better results over the IMU for workouts counting(0.800 vs. 0.756 when wearing the sensors on the wrist). In the second case, we tried to recognize actions related to manipulating objects and physical collaboration between users by using a wrist-worn HBC sensing unit. We detected collaboration between the users with 0.69 F-score when receiving data from a single user and 0.78 when receiving data from both users. The capacitive sensor can improve the recognition of collaborative activities with an F-score over a single wrist accelerometer approach by 16\%.

Learning from the Best: Contrastive Representations Learning Across Sensor Locations for Wearable Activity Recognition

We address the well-known wearable activity recognition problem of having to work with sensors that are non-optimal in terms of information they provide but have to be used due to wearability/usability concerns (e.g. the need to work with wrist-worn IMUs because they are embedded in most smart watches). To mitigate this problem we propose a method that facilitates the use of information from sensors that are only present during the training process and are unavailable during the later use of the system. The method transfers information from the source sensors to the latent representation of the target sensor data through contrastive loss that is combined with the classification loss during joint training. We evaluate the method on the well-known PAMAP2 and Opportunity benchmarks for different combinations of source and target sensors showing average (over all activities) F1 score improvements of between 5% and 13% with the improvement on individual activities, particularly well suited to benefit from the additional information going up to between 20% and 40%.

TASKED: Transformer-based Adversarial learning for human activity recognition using wearable sensors via Self-KnowledgE Distillation

Wearable sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) has emerged as a principal research area and is utilized in a variety of applications. Recently, deep learning-based methods have achieved significant improvement in the HAR field with the development of human-computer interaction applications. However, they are limited to operating in a local neighborhood in the process of a standard convolution neural network, and correlations between different sensors on body positions are ignored. In addition, they still face significant challenging problems with performance degradation due to large gaps in the distribution of training and test data, and behavioral differences between subjects. In this work, we propose a novel Transformer-based Adversarial learning framework for human activity recognition using wearable sensors via Self-KnowledgE Distillation (TASKED), that accounts for individual sensor orientations and spatial and temporal features. The proposed method is capable of learning cross-domain embedding feature representations from multiple subjects datasets using adversarial learning and the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) regularization to align the data distribution over multiple domains. In the proposed method, we adopt the teacher-free self-knowledge distillation to improve the stability of the training procedure and the performance of human activity recognition. Experimental results show that TASKED not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the four real-world public HAR datasets (alone or combined) but also improves the subject generalization effectively.