Human Activity Recognition Based on Wearable
Devices and Feedforward Neural Networks
James Parluhutan Hutabarat∗1 , Nur Ahmadi∗2 , Trio Adiono∗3
∗ School of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Bandung Institute of Technology, Bandung, 40132, Indonesia
† Center for Artificial Intelligence (U-CoE AI-VLB), Bandung Institute of Technology, Bandung, 40132, Indonesia
Email: 1 13219070@std.stei.itb.ac.id, 2 nahmadi@itb.ac.id, 3 tadiono@stei.itb.ac.id
Abstract—Human activity recognition (HAR) using wearable
sensors has garnered significant attention in recent years. This
technology can continuously track human activities which is
essential for remote health monitoring, elderly care, and re-
habilitation. In this study, we propose a simple feedforward
neural network (FFNN) model equipped with four fully connected
layers to enhance the accuracy of HAR. Experimental results
conducted on the UCI-HAR (UCI Human Activity Recognition)
dataset show that the proposed FFNN model achieve an accuracy
and F1 score of 0.96. It outperforms other existing algorithms,
which are K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Support Vector
Machines (SVM), highlighting the effectiveness of a simplified
neural network architecture in enhancing HAR performance.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Human activity recognition (HAR) has evolved rapidly with
the development of wearable technology. These devices have
seamlessly integrated into everyday life, catering to a multitude
of applications [1], [2]. These devices continuously track an
individual’s movements and position, enabling location-based
services and enhancing various aspects of daily life [3]. HAR
technologies have gone through extensive development, with
a focus on improving accuracy, particularly when deployed
on wearable devices such as smartwatches and smartphones.
These devices are strategically placed on different parts of the
human body, including the wrist, ankle, chest, knee, and neck
[4].
Efforts have been made to create compact models suitable
for smaller devices, such as microcontrollers [5]. Microcon-
trollers, often with less than 1Mb of memory, require compact
models. Simple and accurate models are a practical solution,
alongside techniques like model quantization and pruning
[6]. Key sensors, including accelerometers, gyroscopes, and
magnetometers, play a pivotal role in understanding human
activities [7]. This study specifically utilizes accelerometer
and gyroscope data to track human movements and recognize
six fundamental activities: walking, walking upstairs, walking
downstairs, sitting, standing, and lying down. Accurate recog-
nition of these activities holds significant potential for daily
monitoring and assistance [8].
While various techniques, including K-Nearest Neighbors
(KNN) [9], Support Vector Machine (SVM) [10], Recurrent
979-8-3503-8129-0/23/$31.00 ©2023 IEEE
Neural Networks (RNN) [11], Long Short-Term Memory-
based RNN (RNN-LSTM) [12], and Convolutional Neural
Networks (CNN) [13], have demonstrated high accuracy in
HAR, they often entail complex algorithms compared to
conventional neural networks. Our primary objective is to
achieve high classification accuracy using publicly available
dataset to infer human activity information. In this paper,
we leverage the new version of the UCI-HAR (University of
California Irvine Human Activity Recognition) dataset [14],
which comprises accelerometer and gyroscope data collected
via smartphones, each labeled with a corresponding activity.
Our approach focuses on modeling human activity patterns
effectively.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
introduces the methodology including dataset specification,
data preprocessing, the proposed Feedforward Neural Network
(FFNN) model and its underlying theory. Section III presents
the experimental results, including accuracy, precision, recall,
F1 score, and a detailed examination of the confusion matrix.
Finally, in Section IV, we conclude our findings.
II. M ETHODS
A. Dataset Specification
This paper utilized the UCI-HAR dataset to recognize
human activities. The dataset consists of data collected from
users wearing a smartphone on their waist, equipped with two
motion-embedded sensors. The data collection was conducted
with a Samsung Galaxy S II device at a sampling frequency
of 50 Hz [14]. Table I provides an overview of the dataset’s
specifications.
TABLE I
DATASET S PECIFICATION
Specification UCI-HAR
Device Samsung Galaxy S II
Sensor Accelerometer & Gyroscope
Sampling frequency 50 Hz
Number of samples 10,929
Number of subjects 30
Number of activities 6
 Fig. 1. Diagram of HAR model development.
B. Data Preprocessing
Data preprocessing involves the transformation of raw data
into a suitable format for machine learning processes. The key
steps in data preprocessing include normalization, label encod-
ing, and the division of the dataset into training, validation, and
testing subsets.
1) Normalization: Accelerometer and gyroscope data from
the sensors have varying value ranges. Therefore, the first step
in preprocessing is to normalize the data to ensure that each
feature has a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one.
This is done using the StandardScaler from the Scikit-
learn library.
2) Label Encoding: The labels for human activities in the
initial dataset are initially represented in categorical (text)
form, such as “Walking”, “Sitting”, “Standing”, and others.
To convert categorical data into numerical form and make it
suitable for training machine learning models, label encoding
is performed using the Scikit-learn’s LabelEncoder
3) Splitting: The initial dataset is split into three sub-
sets: training, validation, and testing, using the Scikit-learn’s
train_test_split function. The data splitting propor-
tions are as 64% for training, 16% for validation, and 20%
for testing.
C. FeedForward Neural Networks (FFNN)
Feedforward neural networks consist of several layers with
interconnected nodes. There are three types of layers: input
layer, hidden layer, and output layer. The input layer is the
first layer which receives input data from the sensor. It takes
the input and adds the bias to the output.
out = x · w + b (1)
where x is the input data, w is the weight matrix, b is the bias
term, and out is the output data. This first layer is activated
using ReLu non-linear activation function [15].
out = max(0, x) (2)
where x is the input data from the input layer. We also use
dropout function to prevent overfitting by setting the fraction
from the output of ReLu activation to zero.
out = x · mask (3)
where out is the output data, x is the input data from the input
layer, and mask is a binary mask that sets the output of the
activation to zero.
We employ four fully connected layers for human activity
recognition task. After the last fully connected layer, a softmax
layer is used to obtain probability distribution over the classes.
This function normalized the output of the final hidden layer
using exponentiating each element and dividing it by sums of
exponentiated [16].
exp(xi )
softmax(xi ) = P (4)
j exp(xj )
where i is the index from the output layer, j is the total index
from the output layer, xi is the output value of the ith neuron,
and xj is the output value of the jth neuron.
The FFNN model is shown in Figure 1. The model uses
four fully connected layers and three dropout layers. In the
first layer, the model employs a linear layer with an input
dimension that matches the dataset’s feature size and an output
dimension of 64. Subsequently, the model applies a 50%
dropout rate to randomly deactivate activation from the first
layer’s output. The next hidden layer comprises 32 output
dimensions and also incorporates a 50% dropout rate. The
third hidden layer introduces an additional linear layer with
16 output dimensions. This layer also employs a 50% dropout
rate. Finally, the model’s output layer provides predictions
for the target classes. We utilize the Adam optimizer during
training.
D. Performance Metrics
For the evaluation of the model performance, we use several
metrics which are confusion matrix, precision, recall, F1 score,
 (a)
Fig. 2. Plot of training and validation (a) loss and (b) accuracy.
(a)
Fig. 3. Confusion matrix of (a) KNN, (b) SVM, and (c) FFNN.
and accuracy. Confusion matrix is a fundamental tool that
tabulates true positive, true negative, false positive, and false
negative values. It serves as the foundation for calculating
other performance metrics. Precision measures the proportion
of true positive predictions out of all positive predictions
made by the model. Recall, also known as sensitivity or
true positive rate, quantifies the proportion of true positive
predictions of all actual positive samples. F1 score is the
harmonic mean of precision and recall. It provides a balance
between precision and recall. Accuracy measures the overall
correctness of the model’s predictions. The precision, recall,
F1 score, and accuracy are formulated as follows:
TP
Precision =
TP + FP
TP
Recall =
TP + FN
2 · Precision · Recall
F1 score =
Precision + Recall
TP + TN
Accuracy =
TP + TN + FP + FN
where T P represents true positives (correctly predicted pos-
itive samples), F P represents false positives (incorrectly
predicted positive samples), F N represents false negatives
(missed positive samples), and T N represents true negatives
(correctly predicted negative samples).
(b)
(b) (c)
III. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
The FFNN model was implemented using Python
(v3.10.12), Scikit-learn (v1.2.2) machine learning library [17],
and PyTorch (v2.0.1) deep learning framework [18] running
on Google Colab platform. A series of experiments were
conducted to evaluate the performance of proposed FFNN
model in comparison to other algorithms which are k-nearest
neighbors (KNN) and support vector machine (SVM). Fig-
ure 2(a) shows the training (blue line) and validation (orange
line) loss curves of the proposed FFNN model, whereas Fig-
ure 2(b) shows the training (blue line) and validation (orange
line) accuracy curves of the proposed FFNN model. The best
loss and accuracy were achieved when the epoch reached
(5) 35. Figure 3(a)-(c) shows the confusion matrix between the
predicted activity and the true activity for KNN, SVM, and
(6) FFNN.
The performance comparison among FFNN, KNN, and
(7) SVM for six activities is shown in Table II. The precision,
recall, and F1 score hit the lowest value for standing (0.91),
(8) sitting (0.90), and sitting (0.91), respectively. Except for
sitting and standing cases, FFNN model shows very good
performance with F1 score exceeding 0.95. Table III shows
the average precision, recall, F1 score, and accuracy, which
are 0.96, 0.95, 0.96, and 0.96, respectively. It is shown that
FFNN model outperforms KNN and SVM.
In Table III, the performance of the FFNN model which only
 TABLE II
P ERFORMANCE COMPARISON BETWEEN KNN, SVM, AND FFNN

KNN SVM FFNN

Activity
Precision Recall F1 Score Precision Recall F1 Score Precision Recall F1 Score
WALKING 0.85 0.98 0.91 0.94 0.99 0.96 0.95 0.99 0.97
WALKING UPSTAIRS 0.89 0.89 0.89 0.96 0.94 0.95 0.99 0.92 0.95
WALKING DOWNSTAIRS 0.95 0.79 0.86 0.99 0.95 0.97 0.95 0.97 0.96
SITTING 0.91 0.79 0.85 0.98 0.89 0.93 0.93 0.90 0.91
STANDING 0.83 0.93 0.88 0.90 0.98 0.93 0.91 0.94 0.93
LAYING 1.00 0.99 1.00 1.00 0.99 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00

uses a simple neuron network rather than a complex network
architecture shows better performance than KNN and SVM.
The FFNN model shows a slightly improved performance than
SVM; both have the same average precision and recall scores.
When compared to KNN, FFNN shows signficant performance
improvement across all the precision metrics. The proposed
FFNN model with only 4 fully connected layers have been
able to improve the performance of activity classification.
The confusion matrices of the KNN and SVM show that
the misclassification of standing and laying often occurs. In
this study, the FFNN model enhances the HAR performance,
especially for these two activities.
TABLE III
C OMPARISON OF AVERAGE PERFORMANCE ACROSS MODELS
Average performance KNN SVM FFNN
Precision 0.90 0.96 0.96
Recall 0.90 0.95 0.95
F1 Score 0.89 0.95 0.96
Accuracy 0.91 0.95 0.96
IV. C ONCLUSION
In this study, we propose a Feedforward Neural Network
(FFNN) model comprising four fully connected layers. We
trained our model on accelerometer and gyroscope sensor data
collected from smartphones and benchmarked its performance
against two established models for activity classification. Our
experimental results demonstrate that our proposed FFNN
model outperforms other models in key metrics including
precision, recall, F1 score, and accuracy. It can significantly
enhance the accuracy of classifying activities that were his-
torically prone to misclassification, such as walking upstairs,
standing, and lying down. These findings underscore the
effectiveness of a simple neural network architecture in en-
hancing the accuracy of activity classification and reducing
misclassification rates. Furthermore, the model’s simplicity
and computational efficiency suggest its potential for real-time
activity monitoring on resource-constrained edge devices.
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