Many intelligent systems that focus on the needs of a human require information about the activities being performed by the human. At the core of this capability is activity recognition, which is a challenging and well-researched problem. Activity recognition algorithms require substantial amounts of labeled training data yet need to perform well under very diverse circumstances. As a result, researchers have been designing methods to identify and utilize subtle connections between activity recognition datasets, or to perform transfer-based activity recognition. In this paper we survey the literature to highlight recent advances in transfer learning for activity recognition. We characterize existing approaches to transfer-based activity recognition by sensor modality, by differences between source and target environments, by data availability, and by type of information that is transferred. Finally, we present some grand challenges for the community to consider as this field is further developed.

Transfer learning aims to improve performance on a target task by utilizing previous knowledge learned from source tasks. In this paper we introduce a novel heterogeneous transfer learning technique, Feature- Space Remapping (FSR), which transfers knowledge between domains with different feature spaces. This is accomplished without requiring typical feature-feature, feature instance, or instance-instance co-occurrence data. Instead we relate features in different feature-spaces through the construction of meta-features. We show how these techniques can utilize multiple source datasets to construct an ensemble learner which further improves performance. We apply FSR to an activity recognition problem and a document classification problem. The ensemble technique is able to outperform all other baselines and even performs better than a classifier trained using a large amount of labeled data in the target domain. These problems are especially difficult because in addition to having different feature-spaces, the marginal probability distributions and the class labels are also different. This work extends the state of the art in transfer learning by considering large transfer across dramatically different spaces.

Individuals with cognitive impairment can benefit from intervention strategies like recording important information in a memory notebook. However, training individuals to use the notebook on a regular basis requires a constant delivery of reminders. In this work, we design and evaluate machine learning-based methods for providing automated reminders using a digital memory notebook interface. Specifically, we identify transition periods between activities as times to issue prompts. We consider the problem of detecting activity transitions using supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques, and find that both techniques show promising results for detecting transition periods. We test the techniques in a scripted setting with 15 individuals. Motion sensors data is recorded and annotated as participants perform a fixed set of activities. We also test the techniques in an unscripted setting with 8 individuals. Motion sensor data is recorded as participants go about their normal daily routine. In both the scripted and unscripted settings a true positive rate of greater than 80% can be achieved while maintaining a false positive rate of less than 15%. On average, this leads to transitions being detected within 1 minute of a true transition for the scripted data and within 2 minutes of a true transition on the unscripted data.

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