HierAct: a Hierarchical Model for Human Activity Recognition in Game-Like Educational Applications

Constantly evolving landscape of modern education makes the integration of technology crucial to enable more interactive and immersive learning experiences. One of the key problems in this domain is Human Activity Recognition (HAR), which uses standard smartphone sensors to understand and recognize user movements. While HAR exhibits high potential in this area, its persistent challenge is to differentiating between similar activities, whose occurrences can often lead to misclassification and reduced quality of applications. To tackle this problem, we employ specialized classifiers and use them in a hierarchical manner instead of using monolith multi-class models. We propose HierAct - a Hierarchical model that solves the multi-class human activity recognition problem. We also release a new HAR dataset - EduAct - (https://github.com/iitis/HierAct-Dataset) focused on activities that could be used to create game-like educational applications.Our results show that the performance of the proposed model is substantially better than other state-of-the-art machine learning models. Our work shows the potential of hierarchical classifiers in HAR applications for education, by offering educators and students a more accurate, reliable, and engaging interactive experience.