The vast proliferation of sensor devices and Internet of Things enables the applications of sensor-based activity recognition. However, there exist substantial challenges that could influence the performance of the recognition system in practical scenarios. Recently, as deep learning has demonstrated its effectiveness in many areas, plenty of deep methods have been investigated to address the challenges in activity recognition. In this study, we present a survey of the state-of-the-art deep learning methods for sensor-based human activity recognition. We first introduce the multi-modality of the sensory data and provide information for public datasets that can be used for evaluation in different challenge tasks. We then propose a new taxonomy to structure the deep methods by challenges. Challenges and challenge-related deep methods are summarized and analyzed to form an overview of the current research progress. At the end of this work, we discuss the open issues and provide some insights for future directions.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) is a system empowering humans to communicate with or control the outside world with exclusively brain intentions. Electroencephalography (EEG)-based BCI is one of the promising solutions due to its convenient and portable instruments. Despite the extensive research of EEG in recent years, it is still challenging to interpret EEG signals effectively due to its nature of noise and difficulties in capturing the inconspicuous relations between EEG signals and specific brain activities. Most existing works either only consider EEG as chain-like sequences while neglecting complex dependencies between adjacent signals or requiring complex preprocessing. In this paper, we introduce two deep learning-based frameworks with novel spatio-temporal preserving representations of raw EEG streams to precisely identify human intentions. The two frameworks consist of both convolutional and recurrent neural networks effectively exploring the preserved spatial and temporal information in either a cascade or a parallel manner. Extensive experiments on a large scale movement intention EEG dataset (108 subjects, 3,145,160 EEG records) have demonstrated that the proposed frameworks achieve high accuracy of 98.3% and outperform a set of state-of-the-art and baseline models. The developed models are further evaluated with a real-world brain typing BCI and achieve a recognition accuracy of 93% over five instruction intentions suggesting good generalization over different kinds of intentions and BCI systems.

Recent years have witnessed the success of deep learning methods in human activity recognition (HAR). The longstanding shortage of labeled activity data inherently calls for a plethora of semisupervised learning methods, and one of the most challenging and common issues with semisupervised learning is the imbalanced distribution of labeled data over classes. Although the problem has long existed in broad real-world HAR applications, it is rarely explored in the literature. In this paper, we propose a semisupervised deep model for imbalanced activity recognition from multimodal wearable sensory data. We aim to address not only the challenges of multimodal sensor data (e.g., interperson variability and interclass similarity) but also the limited labeled data and class-imbalance issues simultaneously. In particular, we propose a pattern-balanced semisupervised framework to extract and preserve diverse latent patterns of activities. Furthermore, we exploit the independence of multi-modalities of sensory data and attentively identify salient regions that are indicative of human activities from inputs by our recurrent convolutional attention networks. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves a competitive performance compared to a multitude of state-of-the-art methods, both semisupervised and supervised ones, with 10% labeled training data. The results also show the robustness of our method over imbalanced, small training data sets.

The EEG signal is a medium to realize a BCI system due to its zero clinical risk and portable acquisition devices. Current EEG-based BCI research usually requires a subjectspecific adaptation step before a BCI can be employed by a new user. In contrast, the subject-independent scenario, where a well-trained model can be directly applied to new users without pre-calibration, is particularly desired. Considering this critical gap, the focus in this paper is developing an effective EEG signal analysis adaptively applied to subject-independent settings. We present a Convolutional Recurrent Attention Model (CRAM) that utilizes a convolutional neural network to encode the highlevel representation of EEG signals and a recurrent attention mechanism to explore the temporal dynamics of the EEG signals as well as to focus on the most discriminative temporal periods. Extensive experiments on a benchmark multiclass EEG dataset containing four movement intentions indicate that the proposed model is capable of exploiting the underlying invariant EEG patterns across different subjects and generalizing the patterns to new subjects with better performance than a series of state-ofthe-art and baseline approaches by at least 8 percentage points. The implementation code is made publicly available.

Motor imagery classification from EEG signals is essential for motor rehabilitation with a brain-computer interface (BCI). Most current works on this issue require a subject-specific adaptation step before applying a BCI to a new user. Thus the research of directly extending a pre-trained model to new users is particularly desired and indispensable. As brain dynamics fluctuate considerably across different subjects, it is challenging to design practical hand-crafted features based on prior knowledge. Regarding this gap, this paper proposes a Graph-based Convolutional Recurrent Attention Model (G-CRAM) to explore EEG features across different subjects for motor imagery classification. A graph structure is first developed to represent the positioning information of EEG nodes. Then a convolutional recurrent attention model learns EEG features from both spatial and temporal dimensions and emphasizes the most distinguishable temporal periods. We evaluate the proposed approach on two benchmark EEG datasets for motor imagery classification on the subject-independent testing. The results show that the G-CRAM achieves superior performance to state-of-the-art methods regarding recognition accuracy and ROC-AUC. Furthermore, model interpreting studies reveal the learning process of different neural network components and demonstrate that the proposed model can extract detailed features efficiently.

Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a system empowering humans to communicate with or control the outside world with exclusively brain intentions. Electroencephalography (EEG) based BCIs are promising solutions due to their convenient and portable instruments. Despite the extensive research of EEG in recent years, it is still challenging to interpret EEG signals effectively due to the massive noises in EEG signals (e.g., low signal-noise ratio and incomplete EEG signals), and difficulties in capturing the inconspicuous relationships between EEG signals and certain brain activities. Most existing works either only consider EEG as chain-like sequences neglecting complex dependencies between adjacent signals or requiring pre-processing such as transforming EEG waves into images. In this paper, we introduce both cascade and parallel convolutional recurrent neural network models for precisely identifying human intended movements and instructions effectively learning the compositional spatio-temporal representations of raw EEG streams. Extensive experiments on a large scale movement intention EEG dataset (108 subjects,3,145,160 EEG records) have demonstrated that both models achieve high accuracy near 98.3% and outperform a set of baseline methods and most recent deep learning based EEG recognition models, yielding a significant accuracy increase of 18% in the cross-subject validation scenario. The developed models are further evaluated with a real-world BCI and achieve a recognition accuracy of 93% over five instruction intentions. This suggests the proposed models are able to generalize over different kinds of intentions and BCI systems.