An Incremental Learning Method Based on Probabilistic Neural Networks and Adjustable Fuzzy Clustering for Human Activity Recognition by Using Wearable Sensors

Human activity recognition by using wearable sensors has gained tremendous interest in recent years among a range of health-related areas. To automatically recognize various human activities from wearable sensor data, many classification methods have been tried in prior studies, but most of them lack the incremental learning abilities. In this study, an incremental learning method is proposed for sensor-based human activity recognition. The proposed method is designed based on probabilistic neural networks and an adjustable fuzzy clustering algorithm. The proposed method may achieve the following features. 1) It can easily learn additional information from new training data to improve the recognition accuracy. 2) It can freely add new activities to be detected, as well as remove existing activities. 3) The updating process from new training data does not require previously used training data. An experiment was performed to collect realistic wearable sensor data from a range of activities of daily life. The experimental results showed that the proposed method achieved a good tradeoff between incremental learning ability and the recognition accuracy. The experimental results from comparison with other classification methods demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method further.