A Distributed Wearable Computing Framework for Human Activity Classification
Jhonathan L. Rivas-Caicedo, Kevin Niño-Tejada, Laura Saldaña-Aristizábal, Juan F. Patarroyo-Montenegro · Electronics · 2025
Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using wearable sensors plays a critical role in applications such as healthcare, sports monitoring, and rehabilitation. Traditional approaches typically rely on centralized models that aggregate and process data from multiple sensors simultaneously. However, such architecture often suffers from high latency, increased communication overhead, limited scalability, and reduced robustness, particularly in dynamic environments where wearable systems operate under resource constraints. This paper proposes a distributed neural network framework for HAR, where each wearable sensor independently processes its data using a lightweight neural model and transmits high-level features or predictions to a central neural network for final classification. This strategy alleviates the computational load on the central node, reduces data transmission across the network, and enhances user privacy. We evaluated the proposed distributed framework using our publicly available multi-sensor HAR dataset and compared its performance against a centralized neural network trained on the same data. The results demonstrate that the distributed approach achieves comparable or superior classification accuracy while significantly lowering inference latency and energy consumption. These findings underscore the promise of distributed intelligence in wearable systems for real-time and energy-efficient human activity monitoring.