Attention-Based Sensor Fusion for Human Activity Recognition Using IMU Signals

Abstract: Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using wearable devices such as smart watches embedded with Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors has various applications relevant to our daily life, such as workout tracking and health monitoring. In this paper, we propose a novel attention-based approach to human activity recognition using multiple IMU sensors worn at different body locations. Firstly, a sensor-wise feature extraction module is designed to extract the most discriminative features from individual sensors with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Secondly, an attention-based fusion mechanism is developed to learn the importance of sensors at different body locations and to generate an attentive feature representation. Finally, an inter-sensor feature extraction module is applied to learn the inter-sensor correlations, which are connected to a classifier to output the predicted classes of activities. The proposed approach is evaluated using five public datasets and it outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a wide variety of activity categories.