Unsupervised Human Activity Recognition through Two-stage Prompting with ChatGPT

Wearable sensor devices, which offer the advantage of recording daily objects used by a person while performing an activity, enable the feasibility of unsupervised Human Activity Recognition (HAR). Unfortunately, previous unsupervised approaches using the usage sequence of objects usually require a proper description of activities manually prepared by humans. Instead, we leverage the knowledge embedded in a Large Language Model (LLM) of ChatGPT. Because the sequence of objects robustly characterizes the activity identity, it is possible that ChatGPT already learned the association between activities and objects from existing contexts. However, previous prompt engineering for ChatGPT exhibits limited generalization ability when dealing with a list of words (i.e., sequence of objects) due to the similar weighting assigned to each word in the list. In this study, we propose a two-stage prompt engineering, which first guides ChatGPT to generate activity descriptions associated with objects while emphasizing important objects for distinguishing similar activities; then outputs activity classes and explanations for enhancing the contexts that are helpful for HAR. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that utilizes ChatGPT to recognize activities using objects in an unsupervised manner. We conducted our approach on three datasets and demonstrated the state-of-the-art performance.