The number of older people needing healthcare is a growing global phenomenon. The assistance in long-term care comprises a complex of medical, nursing, rehabilitation, and social assistance services. The cost is substantial, but technology can help reduce spending by ensuring efficient health services and improving the quality of life. Advances in artificial intelligence, wireless communication systems, and nanotechnology allow the creation of intelligent home care systems avoiding hospitalization with evident cost containment. They are capable of ensuring functions of recognition of activities, monitoring of vital functions, and tracking. However, it is essential to also have information on location in order to be able to promptly intervene in case of unforeseen events or assist people in carrying out activities in order to avoid incorrect behavior. In addition, the automatic detection of physical activities performed by human subjects is identified as human activity recognition (HAR). This work presents an overview of the positioning system as part of an integrated HAR system. Lastly, this study contains each technology's concepts, features, accuracy, advantages, and limitations. With this work, we want to highlight the relationship between HAR and the indoor positioning system (IPS), which is poorly documented in the literature.
Keywords: GPS; IPS; human activity recognition; human tracking; indoor localization; positioning algorithms; signal measurement.