Wearable Activity Recognition for Advancing Elderly Care with Modified Transformer Model

Abstract

Technological devices such as smartphones can be utilized in tracking various human activities or movements through built-in accelerometers and gyroscopes. Data obtained from these inertial sensors can be utilized in various applications to assist people, including healthcare, human-computer interaction, and sports. As a result, further developments in the effective classification of time series data through machine and deep learning is highly valued and actively pursued. In this study, the transformer model, a deep learning architecture designed for sequential data such as natural language processing (NLP), has been utilized for analysis of time-series motion readings from wearable accelerometers. The transformer model in this study has been refined by incorporating a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture. By leveraging the HAR70+ dataset with a wide range of activities, the modified transformer model in this study obtained a best accuracy of 95.85%, demonstrating that it can match the performance of state-of-the-art wearable activity recognition methods using Deep Neural Networks (DNN) and LSTM. Hence, the findings presented in this study suggest the future relevance of improved transformer or deep learning models to enhance the quality of life for seniors.