Continual learning is an emerging research challenge in human activity recognition (HAR). As an increasing number of HAR applications are deployed in real-world environments, it is important and essential to extend the activity model to adapt to the change in people’s activity routine. Otherwise, HAR applications can become obsolete and fail to deliver activity-aware services. The existing research in HAR has focused on detecting abnormal sensor events or new activities, however, extending the activity model is currently under-explored. To directly tackle this challenge, we build on the recent advance in the area of lifelong machine learning and design a continual activity recognition system, called
HAR-GAN
, to grow the activity model over time.
HAR-GAN
does not require a prior knowledge on what new activity classes might be and it does not require to store historical data by leveraging the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to generate sensor data on the previously learned activities. We have evaluated
HAR-GAN
on four third-party, public datasets collected on binary sensors and accelerometers. Our extensive empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of
HAR-GAN
in continual activity recognition and shed insight on the future challenges.
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