This paper presents a PhD project related to the identification of a set of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) using different techniques applied to the sensors available in off-the-shelf mobile devices. This project consists on the creation of new methodologies, to identify ADLs, and to present some concepts, such as definition of the set of ADLs relevant to be identified, the mobile device as a multi-sensor system, review of the best techniques for data acquisition, data processing, data validation, data imputation, and data fusion processes, and creation of the methods for the identification of ADLs with data mining, pattern recognition and/or machine learning techniques. However, mobile devices present several limitations, therefore techniques at each stage have to be adapted. As result I.M. Pires() · N.M. Garcia · N. Pombo