Utilizing Self-Supervised Learning for Recognizing Human Activity in Older Adults through Labeling Applications in Real-World Smart Homes

Deep learning models have significantly contributed to recognizing older adults’ daily activities for telemonitoring and assistance. However, recognizing human activities in real-world smart homes over the long term presents substantial challenges. Obtaining the ground truth is time-consuming and costly, yet it is crucial for training and improving deep learning models. Inspired by the impressive performance of self-supervised learning models, this paper utilizes a model based on the SimCLR framework and a self-attention mechanism for downstream human activity recognition. The model leverages the limited and intermittent labeled activities collected by the Label Older Adults’ Daily Activities (LOADA) application, which was deployed and used to acquire activity labels in the real-world, uncontrolled smart homes of three young people and two older adults for over one month. The experimental results demonstrate significant performance in activity recognition, employing semi-supervised learning with limited labels, and transfer learning scenarios where representations learned from one smart home are transferred to another. This research could inspire other human activity recognition community researchers to overcome labeling challenges for monitoring older adults in real-world scenarios.