Are Accelerometers for Activity Recognition a Deadend? Accelerometerbased (and by extension other inertial sensors) research for Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a deadend. This sensor does not offer enough information for us to progress in the core domain of HARto recognize everyday activities from sensor data. Despite continued and prolonged efforts in improving feature engineering and machine learning models, the activities that we can recognize reliably have only expanded slightly and many of the same flaws of early models are still present today. Instead of relying on acceleration data, we should instead consider modalities with much richer informationa logical choice are images. With the rapid advance in image sensing hardware and modelling techniques, we believe that a widespread adoption of image sensors will open many opportunities for accurate and robust inference across a wide spectrum of human activities.  :131,this paper, we make the case for imagers in place of accelerometers as the default sensor for human activity recognition. Our review of past works has led to the observation that progress in HAR had stalled, caused by our reliance on accelerometers. We further argue for the suitability of images for activity recognition by illustrating their richness of information and the marked progress in computer vision. Through a feasibility analysis, we find that deploying imagers and CNNs on device poses no substantial burden on modern mobile hardware. Overall, our work highlights the need to move away from accelerometers and calls for further exploration of using imagers for activity recognition.

Smart Phone Based Human Activity Recognition Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a field that uses collected data to classify different human actions. One simple and general approach to HAR is to use the sensor data from a mobile device to recognize different patterns behind complex motions. Early studies show promising results on simple activities using manually selected features from accelerometer readings. As newer publicly available datasets include more complex data and activities, manual feature selection have become cumbersome, impractical and face limitations in finding the optimal feature sets for HAR. In this paper, we present an empirical approach to defining models of 3D tensor data structures from 2D time series data obtained from multiple sensors on a smart phone, and a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model, which uses the tensor data and performs automatic feature extraction and classification for HAR. We use the public benchmark dataset, MobiAct v2.0, to train and validate our model, which achieved an overall better performance in classifying 11 Activities of Daily Living (ADL) than the stateoftheart approaches. Compared to the approach presented by Chatzaki et al. which has a very high rate of misclassifications for carstep out (CSO), carstep in (CSI), sit to stand (CHU), and stand to sit (SCH) classes, our proposed approach has 15% higher sensitivity for each of these activities with the optimal number of training epochs being only 25.