AROMA

Abstract

Human activity recognition (HAR) is a promising research issue in ubiquitous and wearable computing. However, there are some problems existing in traditional methods: 1) They treat HAR as a single label classification task, and ignore the information from other related tasks, which is helpful for the original task. 2) They need to predesign features artificially, which are heuristic and not tightly related to HAR task. To address these problems, we propose AROMA (human activity recognition using deep multi-task learning). Human activities can be divided into simple and complex activities. They are closely linked. Simple and complex activity recognitions are two related tasks in AROMA. For simple activity recognition task, AROMA utilizes a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract deep features, which are task dependent and non-handcrafted. For complex activity recognition task, AROMA applies a long short-term memory (LSTM) network to learn the temporal context of activity data. In addition, there is a shared structure between the two tasks, and the object functions of these two tasks are optimized jointly. We evaluate AROMA on two public datasets, and the experimental results show that AROMA is able to yield a competitive performance in both simple and complex activity recognitions.