Human Activity Recognition for Elderly People Using Machine and Deep Learning Approaches

Abstract

There are more than 962 million people aged 60 and up globally. Physical activity declines as people get older, as does their capacity to undertake everyday tasks, effecting both physical and mental health. Many researchers use machine learning and deep learning methods to recognize human activities, but very few studies have been focused on human activity recognition of elderly people. This paper focuses on providing assistance to elderly people by monitoring their activities in different indoor and outdoor environments using gyroscope and accelerometer data collected from a smart phone. Smart phones have been routinely used to monitor the activities of persons with impairments; routine activities such as sitting, walking, going upstairs, going downstairs, standing, and lying are included in the dataset. Conventional Machine Learning and Deep Learning algorithms such as k-Nearest Neighbors, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, Artificial Neural Network, and Long Short-Term Memory Network are used for human activity recognition. Long Short-Term Memory is a recurrent neural network variation that is best suited to handling temporal sequences. Two-fold and ten-fold cross-validation methods were performed to show the effect of changing the data in the training and testing dataset. Among all the classification techniques, the proposed Long Short-Term Memory Network gave the best accuracy of 95.04%. However, Support Vector Machine gave 89.07% accuracy with a very low computational time of 0.42 min using 10-fold cross-validation.