Deep Learning for Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition: Overview, Challenges and Opportunities
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Abstract (arXiv)
The vast proliferation of sensor devices and Internet of Things enables the applications of sensor-based activity recognition. However, there exist substantial challenges that could influence the performance of the recognition system in practical scenarios. Recently, as deep learning has demonstrated its effectiveness in many areas, plenty of deep methods have been investigated to address the challenges in activity recognition. In this study, we present a survey of the state-of-the-art deep learning methods for sensor-based human activity recognition. We first introduce the multi-modality of the sensory data and provide information for public datasets that can be used for evaluation in different challenge tasks. We then propose a new taxonomy to structure the deep methods by challenges. Challenges and challenge-related deep methods are summarized and analyzed to form an overview of the current research progress. At the end of this work, we discuss the open issues and provide some insights for future directions.
Key facts. Cited by 125 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2020.
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 13; 2022: 17; 2023: 26; 2024: 31; 2025: 19; 2026: 19.
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- 2023Deep Learning for Time Series Classification and Extrinsic Regression: A Current Surveycited by 68
- 2021Deep Gait Recognition: A Surveycited by 54
- 2021Deep Learning in Human Activity Recognition with Wearable Sensors: A Review on Advancescited by 54
- 2022What Makes Good Contrastive Learning on Small-Scale Wearable-based Tasks?cited by 39
- 2021Improving Deep Learning for HAR with shallow LSTMscited by 30
- 2024Universal Time-Series Representation Learning: A Surveycited by 28
- 2021Continual Learning in Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition: an Empirical Benchmark Analysiscited by 21
- 2021A Survey of Human Activity Recognition in Smart Homes Based on IoT Sensors Algorithms: Taxonomies, Challenges, and Opportunities with Deep Learningcited by 21
- 2022Domain Generalization for Activity Recognition via Adaptive Feature Fusioncited by 16
- 2024Hierarchical State Space Models for Continuous Sequence-to-Sequence Modelingcited by 15
- 2023Remote patient monitoring using artificial intelligence: Current state, applications, and challengescited by 14
- 2024Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Recognizers for Activities of Daily Livingcited by 13
38 more
- 2022Transformer-based Models to Deal with Heterogeneous Environments in Human Activity Recognitioncited by 12
- 2024By My Eyes: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models with Sensor Data via Visual Promptingcited by 12
- 2023Hang-Time HAR: A Benchmark Dataset for Basketball Activity Recognition using Wrist-Worn Inertial Sensorscited by 11
- 2023Graph-Aware Contrasting for Multivariate Time-Series Classificationcited by 11
- 2024HARMamba: Efficient and Lightweight Wearable Sensor Human Activity Recognition Based on Bidirectional Mambacited by 11
- 2022Human Activity Recognition Using Tools of Convolutional Neural Networks: A State of the Art Review, Data Sets, Challenges and Future Prospectscited by 10
- 2023Timestamp-supervised Wearable-based Activity Segmentation and Recognition with Contrastive Learning and Order-Preserving Optimal Transportcited by 10
- 2024A Survey on Multimodal Wearable Sensor-based Human Action Recognitioncited by 10
- 2024Machine Learning Techniques for Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition with Data Heterogeneity -- A Reviewcited by 9
- 2024Using Large Language Models to Compare Explainable Models for Smart Home Human Activity Recognitioncited by 9
- 2021Sensor Data Augmentation by Resampling for Contrastive Learning in Human Activity Recognitioncited by 7
- 2023Unleashing the Power of Shared Label Structures for Human Activity Recognitioncited by 6
- 2023Worker Activity Recognition in Manufacturing Line Using Near-body Electric Fieldcited by 6
- 2023Large Scale Foundation Models for Intelligent Manufacturing Applications: A Surveycited by 6
- 2024Diverse Intra- and Inter-Domain Activity Style Fusion for Cross-Person Generalization in Activity Recognitioncited by 6
- 2022Negative Selection by Clustering for Contrastive Learning in Human Activity Recognitioncited by 5
- 2022Efficient Deep Clustering of Human Activities and How to Improve Evaluationcited by 5
- 2024Rough Transformers for Continuous and Efficient Time-Series Modellingcited by 5
- 2024Cross-user activity recognition via temporal relation optimal transportcited by 5
- 2024Generalizable Sensor-Based Activity Recognition via Categorical Concept Invariant Learningcited by 5
- 2025MoPFormer: Motion-Primitive Transformer for Wearable-Sensor Activity Recognitioncited by 5
- 2021B-HAR: an open-source baseline framework for in depth study of human activity recognition datasets and workflowscited by 4
- 2022Temporal Feature Alignment in Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for Human Activity Recognitioncited by 4
- 2023Zone-based Federated Learning for Mobile Sensing Datacited by 4
- 2023A Multi-Task Deep Learning Approach for Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition and Segmentationcited by 4
- 2024A Survey of IMU Based Cross-Modal Transfer Learning in Human Activity Recognitioncited by 4
- 2025Scaling laws in wearable human activity recognitioncited by 4
- 2022BSDGAN: Balancing Sensor Data Generative Adversarial Networks for Human Activity Recognitioncited by 3
- 2022Transformers in Action Recognition: A Review on Temporal Modelingcited by 3
- 2024Representation Learning for Wearable-Based Applications in the Case of Missing Datacited by 3
- 2024MaskFi: Unsupervised Learning of WiFi and Vision Representations for Multimodal Human Activity Recognitioncited by 3
- 2024P2LHAP:Wearable sensor-based human activity recognition, segmentation and forecast through Patch-to-Label Seq2Seq Transformercited by 3
- 2024Deep Generative Domain Adaptation with Temporal Relation Knowledge for Cross-User Activity Recognitioncited by 3
- 2024Deep Generative Domain Adaptation with Temporal Attention for Cross-User Activity Recognitioncited by 3
- 2025EgoCHARM: Resource-Efficient Hierarchical Activity Recognition using an Egocentric IMU Sensorcited by 3
- 2022Lifelong Personal Context Recognitioncited by 2
- 2022Domain Adaptation Under Behavioral and Temporal Shifts for Natural Time Series Mobile Activity Recognitioncited by 2
- 2022Multi-level Contrast Network for Wearables-based Joint Activity Segmentation and Recognitioncited by 2
50 most cited of 125 All 125 (JSON)
- 2026Coverage-Aware Virtual IMU Augmentation for Low-Resource Human Activity Recognition15 Sep 2026
- 2026You Don't Need To Train: Agentic Heuristic Learning Studio for Executable Human Activity Recognition13 Sep 2026
- 2026EdgeHAR: An Edge-Native Compact Sensor Foundation Model for Human Activity Recognition13 Sep 2026
- 2026A Deep Generative Model for Synthesizing Labeled Wireless Signals4 Sep 2026
- 2026Rotation-Invariant Multi-IMU Activity Recognition under Independent Per-Location Orientation Shifts16 Aug 2026
- 2026Visual Anchoring in Diffusion: Multimodal Zero-Shot Skeleton Action Recognition5 Aug 2026
- 2026WHAR Arena: Benchmarking the State of the Art in Efficient Wearable Human Activity Recognition11 Jun 2026
- 2026Translating Signals to Languages for sEMG-Based Activity Recognition21 May 2026
- 2026GenHAR: Generalizing Cross-domain Human Activity Recognition for Last-mile Delivery21 May 2026
- 2026KAN-MLP-Mixer: A comprehensive investigation of the usage of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for improving IMU-based Human Activity Recognition18 May 2026
- 2026BenchHAR: Benchmarking Self-Supervised Learning for Generalizable Sensor-based Activity Recognition8 May 2026
- 2026Temporal Structure Matters for Efficient Test-Time Adaptation in Wearable Human Activity Recognition6 May 2026
38 more
- 2026Triple Spectral Fusion for Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition4 May 2026
- 2026Authority Inversion in LLM-Mediated Ubiquitous Systems: When Models Trust Users Over Sensors28 Apr 2026
- 2026An Open-Source, Open Data Approach to Activity Classification from Triaxial Accelerometry in an Ambulatory Setting10 Apr 2026
- 2026Gated Adaptation for Continual Learning in Human Activity Recognition8 Mar 2026
- 2026Motion Capture is Not the Target Domain: Scaling Synthetic Data for Learning Motion Representations11 Feb 2026
- 2026MicroBi-ConvLSTM: An Ultra-Lightweight Efficient Model for Human Activity Recognition on Resource Constrained Devices6 Feb 2026
- 2026SkeFi: Cross-Modal Knowledge Transfer for Wireless Skeleton-Based Action Recognition18 Jan 2026
- 2025Exploring Spatial-Temporal Representation via Star Graph for mmWave Radar-based Human Activity Recognition12 Dec 2025
- 2025MMA: A Momentum Mamba Architecture for Human Activity Recognition with Inertial Sensors26 Nov 2025
- 2025LoRA-Edge: Tensor-Train-Assisted LoRA for Practical CNN Fine-Tuning on Edge Devices5 Nov 2025
- 2025Efficient Online Continual Learning in Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition4 Nov 2025
- 2025AI-Based Stroke Rehabilitation Domiciliary Assessment System with ST_GCN Attention27 Sep 2025
- 2025Reinforcement Learning Driven Generalizable Feature Representation for Cross-User Activity Recognition31 Aug 2025
- 2025Physically Plausible Data Augmentations for Wearable IMU-based Human Activity Recognition Using Physics Simulation18 Aug 2025
- 2025Online Human Action Detection during Escorting30 Jun 2025
- 2025Self-supervised Learning Method Using Transformer for Multi-dimensional Sensor Data Processing28 May 2025
- 2025MoPFormer: Motion-Primitive Transformer for Wearable-Sensor Activity Recognition27 May 2025
- 2025Comparative Study of Generative Models for Early Detection of Failures in Medical Devices7 May 2025
- 2025EgoCHARM: Resource-Efficient Hierarchical Activity Recognition using an Egocentric IMU Sensor24 Apr 2025
- 2025Diffusion-Driven Inertial Generated Data for Smartphone Location Classification20 Apr 2025
- 2025Human Activity Recognition using RGB-Event based Sensors: A Multi-modal Heat Conduction Model and A Benchmark Dataset8 Apr 2025
- 2025Redundant feature screening method for human activity recognition based on attention purification mechanism30 Mar 2025
- 2025HAR-DoReMi: Optimizing Data Mixture for Self-Supervised Human Activity Recognition Across Heterogeneous IMU Datasets16 Mar 2025
- 2025Integrating Biological and Machine Intelligence: Attention Mechanisms in Brain-Computer Interfaces26 Feb 2025
- 2025On Neural Inertial Classification Networks for Pedestrian Activity Recognition23 Feb 2025
- 2025Scaling laws in wearable human activity recognition5 Feb 2025
- 2024Generalizable Sensor-Based Activity Recognition via Categorical Concept Invariant Learning18 Dec 2024
- 2024CKSP: Cross-species Knowledge Sharing and Preserving for Universal Animal Activity Recognition22 Oct 2024
- 2024A Comprehensive Methodological Survey of Human Activity Recognition Across Divers Data Modalities15 Sep 2024
- 2024Protecting Activity Sensing Data Privacy Using Hierarchical Information Dissociation4 Sep 2024
- 2024AI-driven Java Performance Testing: Balancing Result Quality with Testing Time9 Aug 2024
- 2024Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Cross-user Activity Recognition Using Diffusion-based Noise-centred Learning6 Aug 2024
- 2024A State-of-the-Art Review of Computational Models for Analyzing Longitudinal Wearable Sensor Data in Healthcare31 Jul 2024
- 2024FedBChain: A Blockchain-enabled Federated Learning Framework for Improving DeepConvLSTM with Comparative Strategy Insights31 Jul 2024
- 2024Using Large Language Models to Compare Explainable Models for Smart Home Human Activity Recognition24 Jul 2024
- 2024By My Eyes: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models with Sensor Data via Visual Prompting15 Jul 2024
- 2024Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Recognizers for Activities of Daily Living1 Jul 2024
- 2024Diverse Intra- and Inter-Domain Activity Style Fusion for Cross-Person Generalization in Activity Recognition7 Jun 2024
50 newest of 125 All 125 (JSON)
- 2024Hierarchical State Space Models for Continuous Sequence-to-Sequence Modelingcited by 15
- 2024HARMamba: Efficient and Lightweight Wearable Sensor Human Activity Recognition Based on Bidirectional Mambacited by 11
- 2025MMA: A Momentum Mamba Architecture for Human Activity Recognition with Inertial Sensorscited by 0
- 2025MMA: A Momentum Mamba Architecture for Human Activity Recognition with Inertial Sensors26 Nov 2025
- 2024HARMamba: Efficient and Lightweight Wearable Sensor Human Activity Recognition Based on Bidirectional Mamba29 Mar 2024
- 2024Hierarchical State Space Models for Continuous Sequence-to-Sequence Modeling15 Feb 2024
- 2023Deep Learning for Time Series Classification and Extrinsic Regression: A Current Surveycited by 68
- 2021Deep Gait Recognition: A Surveycited by 54
- 2021Deep Learning in Human Activity Recognition with Wearable Sensors: A Review on Advancescited by 54
- 2022What Makes Good Contrastive Learning on Small-Scale Wearable-based Tasks?cited by 39
- 2021Improving Deep Learning for HAR with shallow LSTMscited by 30
- 2024Universal Time-Series Representation Learning: A Surveycited by 28
- 2021Continual Learning in Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition: an Empirical Benchmark Analysiscited by 21
- 2021A Survey of Human Activity Recognition in Smart Homes Based on IoT Sensors Algorithms: Taxonomies, Challenges, and Opportunities with Deep Learningcited by 21
- 2022Domain Generalization for Activity Recognition via Adaptive Feature Fusioncited by 16
- 2023Remote patient monitoring using artificial intelligence: Current state, applications, and challengescited by 14
- 2024Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Recognizers for Activities of Daily Livingcited by 13
- 2022Transformer-based Models to Deal with Heterogeneous Environments in Human Activity Recognitioncited by 12
12 most cited of 118 All 118 (JSON)
- 2026Coverage-Aware Virtual IMU Augmentation for Low-Resource Human Activity Recognition15 Sep 2026
- 2026EdgeHAR: An Edge-Native Compact Sensor Foundation Model for Human Activity Recognition13 Sep 2026
- 2026A Deep Generative Model for Synthesizing Labeled Wireless Signals4 Sep 2026
- 2026Rotation-Invariant Multi-IMU Activity Recognition under Independent Per-Location Orientation Shifts16 Aug 2026
- 2026Visual Anchoring in Diffusion: Multimodal Zero-Shot Skeleton Action Recognition5 Aug 2026
- 2026WHAR Arena: Benchmarking the State of the Art in Efficient Wearable Human Activity Recognition11 Jun 2026
- 2026Translating Signals to Languages for sEMG-Based Activity Recognition21 May 2026
- 2026GenHAR: Generalizing Cross-domain Human Activity Recognition for Last-mile Delivery21 May 2026
- 2026KAN-MLP-Mixer: A comprehensive investigation of the usage of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for improving IMU-based Human Activity Recognition18 May 2026
- 2026BenchHAR: Benchmarking Self-Supervised Learning for Generalizable Sensor-based Activity Recognition8 May 2026
- 2026Temporal Structure Matters for Efficient Test-Time Adaptation in Wearable Human Activity Recognition6 May 2026
- 2026Triple Spectral Fusion for Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition4 May 2026
12 newest of 118 All 118 (JSON)