SensorGAN: A Novel Data Recovery Approach for Wearable Human Activity Recognition

Abstract

Human activity recognition (HAR) and more broadly, activities of daily life recognition using wearable devices, have the potential to transform a number of applications including mobile healthcare, smart homes, and fitness monitoring. Recent approaches for HAR use multiple sensors on various locations on the body to achieve higher accuracy for complex activities. While multiple sensors increase the accuracy, they are also susceptible to reliability issues when one or more sensors are unable to provide data to the application due to sensor malfunction, user error, or energy limitations. Training multiple activity classifiers that use a subset of sensors is not desirable since it may lead to reduced accuracy for applications. To handle these limitations, we propose a novel generative approach that recovers the missing data of sensors using data available from other sensors. The recovered data is then used to seamlessly classify activities. Experiments using three publicly available activity datasets show that with data missing from one sensor, the proposed approach achieves accuracy that is within 10% of the accuracy with no missing data. Moreover, implementation on a wearable device prototype show that the proposed approach takes about 1.5 ms for recovering data in the w-HAR dataset, which results in an energy consumption of 606  μ J. The low energy consumption ensures that SensorGAN is suitable for effectively recovering data in tinyML applications on energy-constrained devices.