Using supervised machine learning approaches to recognize human activities
from on-body wearable accelerometers generally requires a large amount of
labelled data. When ground truth information is not available, too expensive,
time consuming or difficult to collect, one has to rely on unsupervised
approaches. This paper presents a new unsupervised approach for human activity
recognition from raw acceleration data measured using inertial wearable
sensors. The proposed method is based upon joint segmentation of
multidimensional time series using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) in a multiple
regression context. The model is learned in an unsupervised framework using the
Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm where no activity labels are needed.
The proposed method takes into account the sequential appearance of the data.
It is therefore adapted for the temporal acceleration data to accurately detect
the activities. It allows both segmentation and classification of the human
activities. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of
the proposed approach with respect to standard supervised and unsupervised
classification approache