Conditional-UNet : A condition-aware deep model for coherent human activity recognition from wearables

Recognizing human activities from multi-channel time series data collected from wearable sensors has become an important practical application of machine learning. A serious challenge comes from the presence of coherent activities or body movements, such as movements of the head while walking or sitting, since signals representing these movements are mixed and interfere with each other. Basic multi-label classification typically assumes independence within the multiple activities. This is oversimplified and reduces modeling power even when using state-of-the-art deep learning methods. In this paper, we investigate this new problem, which we name “Coherent Human Activity Recognition (Co-HAR)”, that keeps complete conditional dependency between the multiple labels. Additionally, we treat Co-HAR as a dense labelling problem that classifies each sample on a time step with multiple coherent labels to provide high-fidelity and duration-sensitive support to high-precision applications. To explicitly model conditional dependency, a novel condition-aware deep architecture “Conditional-UNet” is developed to allow for multiple dense labeling for Co-HAR. We also contribute a first-of-its-kind Co-HAR dataset for head gesture recognition associated with a user's activity, walking or sitting, to the research community. Extensive experiments on this dataset show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning methods and achieves up to 92% accuracy on context-based head gesture classification.