On-Device Deep Learning Inference for Efficient Activity Data Collection

Abstract

Labeling activity data is a central part of the design and evaluation of human activity recognition systems. The performance of the systems greatly depends on the quantity and “quality” of annotations; therefore, it is inevitable to rely on users and to keep them motivated to provide activity labels. While mobile and embedded devices are increasingly using deep learning models to infer user context, we propose to exploit on-device deep learning inference using a long short-term memory (LSTM)-based method to alleviate the labeling effort and ground truth data collection in activity recognition systems using smartphone sensors. The novel idea behind this is that estimated activities are used as feedback for motivating users to collect accurate activity labels. To enable us to perform evaluations, we conduct the experiments with two conditional methods. We compare the proposed method showing estimated activities using on-device deep learning inference with the traditional method showing sentences without estimated activities through smartphone notifications. By evaluating with the dataset gathered, the results show our proposed method has improvements in both data quality (i.e., the performance of a classification model) and data quantity (i.e., the number of data collected) that reflect our method could improve activity data collection, which can enhance human activity recognition systems. We discuss the results, limitations, challenges, and implications for on-device deep learning inference that support activity data collection. Also, we publish the preliminary dataset collected to the research community for activity recognition.