The following paper presents a comparison study of various machine learning techniques in recognition of activities of daily living (ADL), with special attention being given to movements during human falling and the distinction among various types of falls. The motivation for the development of physical activity recognition algorithm includes keeping track of users' activities in real-time, and possible diagnostics of unwanted and unexpected movements and/or events. The activities recorded and processed in this study include various types of daily activities, such as walking, running, etc., while fall activities include falling forward, falling backward, falling left and right (front fall, back fall and side fall). The algorithm was trained on two publicly available datasets containing signals from an accelerometer, a magnetometer and a gyroscope.