The ubiquity of smartphones and the growth of computing resources, such as connectivity, processing, portability, and power of sensing, have greatly changed people’s lives. Today, many smartphones contain a variety of powerful sensors, including motion, location, network, and direction sensors. Motion or inertial sensors (e.g., accelerometer), specifically, have been widely used to recognize users’ physical activities. This has opened doors for many different and interesting applications in several areas, such as health and transportation. In this perspective, this work provides a comprehensive, state of the art review of the current situation of human activity recognition (HAR) solutions in the context of inertial sensors in smartphones. This article begins by discussing the concepts of human activities along with the complete historical events, focused on smartphones, which shows the evolution of the area in the last two decades. Next, we present a detailed description of the HAR methodology, focusing on the presentation of the steps of HAR solutions in the context of inertial sensors. For each step, we cite the main references that use the best implementation practices suggested by the scientific community. Finally, we present the main results about HAR solutions from the perspective of the inertial sensors embedded in smartphones.

Smartphones have emerged as a revolutionary technology for monitoring everyday life, and they have played an important role in Human Activity Recognition (HAR) due to its ubiquity. The sensors embedded in these devices allows recognizing human behaviors using machine learning techniques. However, not all solutions are feasible for implementation in smartphones, mainly because of its high computational cost. In this context, the proposed method, called HAR-SR, introduces information theory quantifiers as new features extracted from sensors data to create simple activity classification models, increasing in this way the efficiency in terms of computational cost. Three public databases (SHOAIB, UCI, WISDM) are used in the evaluation process. The results have shown that HAR-SR can classify activities with 93% accuracy when using a leave-one-subject-out cross-validation procedure (LOSO).

Human activity recognition (HAR) through sensors embedded in smartphones has allowed for the development of systems that are capable of detecting and monitoring human behavior. However, such systems have been affected by the high consumption of computational resources (e.g., memory and processing) needed to effectively recognize activities. In addition, existing HAR systems are mostly based on supervised classification techniques, in which the feature extraction process is done manually, and depends on the knowledge of a specialist. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a new method for recognizing human activities based on symbolic representation algorithms. The method, called “Multivariate Bag-Of-SFA-Symbols” (MBOSS), aims to increase the efficiency of HAR systems and maintain accuracy levels similar to those of conventional systems based on time and frequency domain features. The experiments conducted on three public datasets showed that MBOSS performed the best in terms of accuracy, processing time, and memory consumption.

In recent years, the consumption of electricity has increased considerably in the industrial, commercial and residential sectors. This has prompted a branch of research which attempts to overcome this problem by applying different information and communication technologies, turning houses and buildings into smart environments. In this paper, we propose and design an energy saving technique based on the relationship between the user's activities and electrical appliances in smart home environments. The proposed method utilizes machine learning techniques to automatically recognize the user's activities, and then a ranking algorithm is applied to relate activities and existing home appliances. Finally, the system gives recommendations to the user whenever it detects a waste of energy. Tests on a real database show that the proposed method can to save up to 35% of electricity in a smart home

Mobile sensing has allowed the emergence of a variety of solutions related to the monitoring and recognition of human activities (HAR). Such solutions have been implemented in smartphones for the purpose of better understanding human behavior. However, such solutions still suffer from the limitations of the computing resources found on smartphones. In this sense, the HAR area has focused on the development of solutions of low computational cost. In general, the strategies used in the solutions are based on shallow and deep learning algorithms. The problem is that not all of these strategies are feasible for implementation in smartphones due to the high computational cost required, mainly, by the steps of data preparation and the training of classification models. In this context, this article evaluates a new set of alternative strategies based on Symbolic Aggregate Approximation (SAX) and Symbolic Fourier Approximation (SFA) algorithms with the purpose of developing solutions with low computational cost in terms of memory and processing. In addition, this article also evaluates some classification algorithms adapted to manipulate symbolic data, such as SAX-VSM, BOSS, BOSS-VS and WEASEL. Experiments were performed on the UCI-HAR, SHOAIB and WISDM databases commonly used in the literature to validate HAR solutions based on smartphones. The results show that the symbolic representation algorithms are faster in the feature extraction phase, on average, by 84.81%, and reduce the consumption of memory space, on average, by 94.48%, and they have accuracy rates equivalent to conventional algorithms.