With the continuous development of new wearable devices, sensor-based human activity recognition is enjoying enormous popularity in research and industry. The signals from inertial sensors allow for the detection, classification, and analysis of human activities such as jogging, cycling, or swimming. However, human activity recognition is often limited to basic activities that occur in short, predetermined periods of time (sliding windows). Complex macro-activities, such as multi-step sports exercises or multi-step cooking recipes, are still only considered to a limited extent, while some works have investigated the classification of macro-activities, the automated understanding of how the underlying micro-activities interact remains an open challenge. This study addresses this gap through the application of graph link prediction, a well-known concept in graph theory and graph neural networks (GNNs). To this end, the presented approach transforms micro-activity sequences into micro-activity graphs that are then processed with a GNN. The evaluation on two derived real-world data sets shows that graph link prediction enables the accurate identification of interactions between micro-activities and the precise validation of composite macro-activities based on learned graph embeddings. Furthermore, this work shows that GNNs can benefit from positional encodings in sequence recognition tasks.
Keywords: GNN; HAR; activity sequences; activity validation; graph link prediction; graph neural network; human macro-activity recognition.