Human Activity Recognition Method Based on Edge Computing-Assisted and GRU Deep Learning Network

Xiaocheng Huang, Youwei Yuan, Chaoqi Chang, Yiming Gao, Chao Zheng, Lamei Yan

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has been proven to be effective in various healthcare and telemonitoring applications. Current HAR methods, especially deep learning, are extensively employed owing to their exceptional recognition capabilities. However, in pursuit of enhancing feature expression abilities, deep learning often introduces a trade-off by increasing Time complexity. Moreover, the intricate nature of human activity data poses a challenge as it can lead to a notable decrease in recognition accuracy when affected by additional noise. These aspects will significantly impair recognition performance. To advance this field further, we present a HAR method based on an edge-computing-assisted and GRU deep-learning network. We initially proposed a model for edge computing to optimize the energy consumption and processing time of wearable devices. This model transmits HAR data to edge-computable nodes, deploys analytical models on edge servers for remote training, and returns results to wearable devices for processing. Then, we introduced an initial convolution method to preprocess large amounts of training data more effectively. To this end, an attention mechanism was integrated into the network structure to enhance the analysis of confusing data and improve the accuracy of action classification. Our results demonstrated that the proposed approach achieved an average accuracy of 85.4% on the 200 difficult-to-identify HAR data, which outperforms the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) method’s accuracy of 77.1%. The experimental results showcase the efficacy of the proposed method and offer valuable insights for the future application of HAR.