Human activity recognition using improved complete ensemble EMD with adaptive noise and long short-term memory neural networks

Abstract The recognition of human activities is a topic of great relevance due to its wide range of applications. Different approaches have been proposed to recognize human activities, ranging from the comparison of signals with thresholds to the application of deep and machine learning techniques. In this work, the classification of six human activities (walking, walking downstairs, walking upstairs, standing, sitting, and lying down) is performed using bidirectional LSTM networks that exploit intrinsic mode function (IMF) representation of inertial signals. Records with inertial signals (accelerometer and gyroscope) of 2.56 s, available at the UCI Machine Learning Repository, were collected from 30 subjects using a smartphone. First, inertial signals were standardized to take them to the same scale and were decomposed into IMF using the improved complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (ICEEMDAN). IMF were then segmented (split) into nine segments of 1.28 s with 12.5% overlap and introduced to a first network with four outputs to identify the dynamic activities and the statics as a single class called “ statics ”, giving 98.86% accuracy. Then, the non-segmented IMF of the records assigned to the statics class were introduced to a second network to classify their three activities, giving an accuracy of 88.46%. In total, 92.91% accuracy was obtained to classify the six human activities. This performance is because ICEEMDAN allowed the extraction of information that was embedded in the signal, and the segmentation of the IMF allowed the network to discriminate between static and dynamic activities.