In the present scenario, automatic Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is an emerging research topic, particularly in the applications of healthcare, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), and smart homes. By reviewing existing literature, the majority of the HAR methods achieved limited performance, while trained and tested utilizing unseen Internet of Things (IoT) data. In order to achieve higher recognition performance in the context of HAR, a new clustering method named Modified Differential Evolution based Fuzzy Clustering (MDEFC) is proposed in this article. The proposed MDEFC method incorporates an asymptotic termination rule and a new differential weight for enhancing the termination condition and improving this method’s ability in exploring the solution space of the objective function. The extensive empirical analysis states that the proposed MDEFC method achieved impressive recognition results with minimal training time by using both spatial and temporal features of the individual. The proposed MDEFC method’s effectiveness is tested on a real time dataset and an online Wireless Sensor Data Mining (WISDM) v1.1 dataset. The result findings demonstrate that the proposed MDEFC method averagely obtained 99.73 % of precision and 99.86 % of recall on the WISDM v1.1 dataset. Similarly, the proposed MDEFC method averagely obtained 93.46 % of f1-measure, 94.60 % of recall, and 93.88 % of precision on the real time dataset. These obtained experimental results are significantly higher in comparison to the traditional HAR methods.