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Activity recognition using data collected with smart devices such as mobile and wearable sensors has become a critical component of many emerging applications ranging from behavioral medicine to gaming. However, an unprecedented increase in the diversity of smart devices in the internet-of-things era has limited the adoption of activity recognition models for use across different devices. This lack of cross-domain adaptation is particularly notable across sensors of different modalities where the mapping of the sensor data in the traditional feature level is highly challenging. To address this challenge, we propose ActiLabel, a combinatorial framework that learns structural similarities among the events that occur in a target domain and those of a source domain and identifies an optimal mapping between the two domains at their structural level. The structural similarities are captured through a graph model, referred to as the dependency graph, which abstracts details of activity patterns in low-level signal and feature space. The activity labels are then autonomously learned in the target domain by finding an optimal tiered mapping between the dependency graphs. We carry out an extensive set of experiments on three large datasets collected with wearable sensors involving human subjects. The results demonstrate the superiority of ActiLabel over state-of-the-art transfer learning and deep learning methods. In particular, ActiLabel outperforms such algorithms by average F1-scores of 36.3%, 32.7%, and 9.1% for cross-modality, cross-location, and cross-subject activity recognition, respectively. 

Automatic lying posture tracking is an important factor in human health monitoring. The increasing popularity of the wrist-based trackers provides the means for unobtrusive, affordable, and long-term monitoring with minimized privacy concerns for the end-users and promising results in detecting the type of physical activity, step counting, and sleep quality assessment. However, there is limited research on development of accurate and efficient lying posture tracking models using wrist-based sensor. Our experiments demonstrate a major drop in the accuracy of the lying posture tracking using wrist-based accelerometer sensor due to the unpredictable noise from arbitrary wrist movements and rotations while sleeping. In this paper, we develop a deep transfer learning method that improves performance of lying posture tracking using noisy data from wrist sensor by transferring the knowledge from an initial setting which contains both clean and noisy data. The proposed solution develops an optimal mapping model from the noisy data to the clean data in the initial setting using LSTM sequence regression, and reconstruct clean synthesized data in another setting where no noisy sensor data is available. This increases the lying posture tracking F1-Score by 24.9% for left-wrist and by 18.1% for right-wrist sensors comparing to the case without mapping. 

Recent years have witnessed a growing body of research on autonomous activity recognition models for use in deployment of mobile systems in new settings such as when a wearable system is adopted by a new user. Current research, however, lacks comprehensive frameworks for transfer learning. Specifically, it lacks the ability to deal with partially available data in new settings. To address these limitations, we propose {\it OptiMapper}, a novel uninformed cross-subject transfer learning framework for activity recognition. OptiMapper is a combinatorial optimization framework that extracts abstract knowledge across subjects and utilizes this knowledge for developing a personalized and accurate activity recognition model in new subjects. To this end, a novel community-detection-based clustering of unlabeled data is proposed that uses the target user data to construct a network of unannotated sensor observations. The clusters of these target observations are then mapped onto the source clusters using a complete bipartite graph model. In the next step, the mapped labels are conditionally fused with the prediction of a base learner to create a personalized and labeled training dataset for the target user. We present two instantiations of OptiMapper. The first instantiation, which is applicable for transfer learning across domains with identical activity labels, performs a one-to-one bipartite mapping between clusters of the source and target users. The second instantiation performs optimal many-to-one mapping between the source clusters and those of the target. The many-to-one mapping allows us to find an optimal mapping even when the target dataset does not contain sufficient instances of all activity classes. We show that this type of cross-domain mapping can be formulated as a transportation problem and solved optimally. We evaluate our transfer learning techniques on several activity recognition datasets. Our results show that the proposed community detection approach can achieve, on average, 69%$ utilization of the datasets for clustering with an overall clustering accuracy of 87.5%. Our results also suggest that the proposed transfer learning algorithms can achieve up to 22.5% improvement in the activity recognition accuracy, compared to the state-of-the-art techniques. The experimental results also demonstrate high and sustained performance even in presence of partial data. 

Wearables are poised to transform health and wellness through automation of cost-effective, objective, and real-time health monitoring. However, machine learning models for these systems are designed based on labeled data collected, and feature representations engineered, in controlled environments. This approach has limited scalability of wearables because (i) collecting and labeling sufficiently large amounts of sensor data is a labor-intensive and expensive process; and (ii) wearables are deployed in highly dynamic environments of the end-users whose context undergoes consistent changes. We introduce TransNet , a deep learning framework that minimizes the costly process of data labeling, feature engineering, and algorithm retraining by constructing a scalable computational approach. TransNet learns general and reusable features in lower layers of the framework and quickly reconfigures the underlying models from a small number of labeled instances in a new domain, such as when the system is adopted by a new user or when a previously unseen event is to be added to event vocabulary of the system. Utilizing TransNet on four activity datasets, TransNet achieves an average accuracy of 88.1% in cross-subject learning scenarios using only one labeled instance for each activity class. This performance improves to an accuracy of 92.7% with five labeled instances. 

Detecting when eating occurs is an essential step toward automatic dietary monitoring, medication adherence assessment, and diet-related health interventions. Wearable technologies play a central role in designing unobtrusive diet monitoring solutions by leveraging machine learning algorithms that work on time-series sensor data to detect eating moments. While much research has been done on developing activity recognition and eating moment detection algorithms, the performance of the detection algorithms drops substantially when the model is utilized by a new user. To facilitate the development of personalized models, we propose PALS, Proximity-based Active Learning on Streaming data, a novel proximity-based model for recognizing eating gestures to significantly decrease the need for labeled data with new users. Our extensive analysis in both controlled and uncontrolled settings indicates F-score of PALS ranges from 22% to 39% for a budget that varies from 10 to 60 queries. Furthermore, compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, off-line PALS achieves up to 40% higher recall and 12% higher F-score in detecting eating gestures.