Learning-to-Learn Personalised Human Activity Recognition Models

Human Activity Recognition~(HAR) is the classification of human movement, captured using one or more sensors either as wearables or embedded in the environment~(e.g. depth cameras, pressure mats). State-of-the-art methods of HAR rely on having access to a considerable amount of labelled data to train deep architectures with many train-able parameters. This becomes prohibitive when tasked with creating models that are sensitive to personal nuances in human movement, explicitly present when performing exercises. In addition, it is not possible to collect training data to cover all possible subjects in the target population. Accordingly, learning personalised models with few data remains an interesting challenge for HAR research. We present a meta-learning methodology for learning to learn personalised HAR models for HAR; with the expectation that the end-user need only provides a few labelled data but can benefit from the rapid adaptation of a generic meta-model. We introduce two algorithms, Personalised MAML and Personalised Relation Networks inspired by existing Meta-Learning algorithms but optimised for learning HAR models that are adaptable to any person in health and well-being applications. A comparative study shows significant performance improvements against the state-of-the-art Deep Learning algorithms and the Few-shot Meta-Learning algorithms in multiple HAR domains.