LDA-FedHAR: Federated Human Activity Recognition for Wearable Devices Through Local HAR Data Alignment
Minda Yao, Wei Chen, Zehua Wang, Minglong Cheng, Chuanlei Zhang, Fei Richard Yu, Victor C. M. Leung · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2025
Wearable device-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has attracted considerable interest with the rapid development of the Internet of things (IoT), and Federated Learning (FL) has been widely adopted in this domain for its ability to collaboratively train models across decentralized devices while preserving privacy. However, its performance is hindered by data heterogeneity arising from variations in the placement of the wearable devices, user behaviors, and physiological characteristics. In this work, we present LDA-FedHAR, a federated HAR framework designed for wearable devices by capturing more common knowledge from aligned client HAR data. It performs Local HAR Data Alignment (LDA) on each client, which is an entirely on-device alignment method that operates independently on local HAR data. By computing the transformation matrix solely from local HAR data and applying it to the data itself, LDA projects heterogeneous client data into a unified space, thereby reducing inter-client discrepancies at the source. To further enhance efficiency and robustness, we propose two IMU-specific variants, LDA(S-IMU) and LDA(C-IMU), which explore intra-and inter-IMU correlations based on practical placements of wearable devices. Experiments are conducted on 4 public HAR datasets: HHAR, Shoaib2014, OPPORTUNITY++, and PAMAP2. The results show that LDA effectively reduces inter-client discrepancies, and LDA-FedHAR along with its variants consistently outperforms state-of-the-art FL methods. Moreover, the improvements achieved by integrating LDA into other FL methods highlight its applicability.