# Characterizing the Performance Gap in Human Activity Recognition for Older Adults

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02711 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02711/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Training BatchNorm and Only BatchNorm: On the Expressive Power of Random Features in CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00152/) (2020)
- [Multi-task Self-Supervised Learning for Human Activity Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11879/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Learning for Human Activity Recognition Using 700,000 Person-days of Wearable Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02909/) (2022)
- [Ensembles of Deep LSTM Learners for Activity Recognition using Wearables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09370/) (2017)
- [Semantic-Discriminative Mixup for Generalizable Sensor-based Cross-domain Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06629/) (2022)
- [Human Activity Recognition from Wearable Sensor Data Using Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09018/) (2020)
- [Optimization-Free Test-Time Adaptation for Cross-Person Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18562/) (2023)
- [What's Different between Visual Question Answering for Machine "Understanding" Versus for Accessibility?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14966/) (2022)
- [MyMove: Facilitating Older Adults to Collect In-Situ Activity Labels on a Smartwatch with Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00145/) (2022)
- [Multi-channel Time Series Decomposition Network For Generalizable Sensor-Based Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16872/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human activity recognition (HAR) from wrist-worn accelerometers is increasingly used for health and behavioral tracking. Yet, most wearable HAR models are developed and evaluated on datasets dominated by younger adults, leaving it unclear whether benchmark progress generalizes across age groups. In this work, we leverage MyMove, our carefully annotated, free-living older-adult HAR dataset (mean age 71), to evaluate deep-learning architectures and training regimes under both leave-one-subject-out and cross-dataset transfer. We find that improvements on younger-adult benchmarks fail to transfer equally to data collected from older adults, resulting in a persistent and often widening performance gap. However, richer representations, particularly frozen self-supervised features pretrained on the age-diverse UK Biobank dataset, substantially improve performance on data from older adults and consistently narrow the performance gap, at modest cost to younger-adult performance, though disparities remain. These findings suggest that benchmark gains and architectural scaling alone provide an incomplete picture of progress in wearable HAR, and broader advances may require representations that better capture population diversity, alongside personalized adaptation to individual movement patterns and routines.