Multi-sensory environment analysis and human activity recognition via wearable technologies

The sensing of human activities and user surrounding environments is an essential topic in computer science. Application domains include the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), healthcare, sports gear and military use cases. Especially mobile or wearable technologies made significant progress in the past years. The current development of Smartwatches and Smartphones which include a variety of sensors is a good example for this progress. With the increasing sensor density in unobtrusive wearable designs, new ways for complex Human Activity Recognition (HAR) and environmental sensing (ES) are opened. This paper focuses on the current state of the art in wearable sensor technologies and gives a short overview of present techniques for HAR and ES. Therefore, a classification of sensors by use case and body position is made. Furthermore, the principal challenges and issues are discussed and known solutions will be referenced. Finally, existing problems that should be addressed are pointed out.