Classification and suitability of sensing technologies for activity recognition

Wider availability of sensors and sensing systems has pushed research in the direction of automatic activity recognition (AR) either for medical or other personal benefits e.g. wellness or fitness monitoring. Researchers apply different AR techniques/algorithms and use a wide range of sensors to discover home activities. However, it seems that the AR algorithms are purely technology-driven rather than informing studies on the type and quality of input required. There is an expectation to over-instrument the environment or the subjects and then develop AR algorithms, where instead the problem should be approached from a different angle i.e. what sensors (type, quality and quantity) a given algorithm requires to infer particular activities with a certain confidence? This paper introduces the concept of activity recognition, its taxonomy and familiarises the reader with sub-classes of sensor-based AR. Furthermore, it presents an overview of existing health services Telecare and Telehealth solutions, and introduces the hierarchical taxonomy of human behaviour analysis tasks. This work is a result of a systematic literature review and it presents the reader with a comprehensive set of home-based activities of daily living (ADL) and sensors proven to recognise these activities. Apart from reviewing usefulness of various sensing technologies for home-based AR algorithms, it highlights the problem of technology-driven cycle of development in this area.