ReviewNPJ digital medicine2021
A systematic review of smartphone-based human activity recognition methods for health research.
Review in NPJ digital medicine, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 72 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
72 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 221 citations in OpenAlex.
- Activity and Behavioral Recognition Using Sensing Technology in Persons with Parkinson's Disease or Dementia: An Umbrella Review of the Literature.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Pooled it
- Motion Tracking of Daily Living and Physical Activities in Health Care: Systematic Review From Designers' Perspective.JMIR mHealth and uHealth · 2024Pooled it
- Deployment-Oriented Evaluation of Lightweight IMU-Based Human Activity Recognition: On-Device Efficiency and Streaming Feasibility.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Increased Gait Variability while Texting and Walking with Added Cognitive Loads in Challenging Environments.Journal of musculoskeletal & neuronal interactions · 2026Article
- Enhancing mobile brain and body imaging: Open-source solutions for real-world research applications.iScience · 2026Article
- Smartphone Sensor Battery Consumption: A Standardized and Reproducible Test Protocol.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Smartphone gaze-tracking for accessible psychiatric assessment.Npj mental health research · 2026Article
- Validity of Smartphone-Based Measurement for Assessing Lower Limb Power for Sarcopenia and Frailty Discrimination: Cross-Sectional Study.JMIR formative research · 2026Article
- Placement-Dependent Accuracy of a Smartphone-Based Sensor Application Compared to an Accelerometer-Based System for Measuring Physical Activity in Healthy Adults: A Validation Study.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Application of Machine Learning Approach to Classify Human Activity Level Based on Lifelog Data.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Human Activity Recognition Dataset for Pedestrians with Mobility Disabilities.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Longitudinal voice biomarker trajectory modelling for Parkinson's disease severity: domain-adaptive transfer learning on mPower real-world smartphone data.Frontiers in digital health · 2026Article
- Article
- Personalized fitness recommendations using machine learning for optimized national health strategy.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Acute Effects of Complex Hand Proprioceptive Task on Low-Frequency Hand Rest Tremor.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Integrating swin transfer with attention mechanism based hybrid deep learning driven automated human activity recognition for enhanced disability assistance.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Early changes in passively sensed homestay predict depression symptom improvement during digital behavioral activation.Behaviour research and therapy · 2025Article
- Harnessing Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) for Environmental Epidemiology: A Narrative Review.Current environmental health reports · 2025Review
- Measuring Psychological Well-Being and Behaviors Using Smartphone-Based Digital Phenotyping: An Intensive Longitudinal Observational mHealth Pilot Study Embedded in a Prospective Cohort of Women.JMIR mHealth and uHealth · 2025Observational
- Smartphone-Based Measures as Indicators of Functional Status in Patients With Advanced Cancer.JAMA network open · 2025Article
12 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Smartphones are now nearly ubiquitous; their numerous built-in sensors enable continuous measurement of activities of daily living, making them especially well-suited for health research. Researchers have proposed various human activity recognition (HAR) systems aimed at translating measurements from smartphones into various types of physical activity. In this review, we summarized the existing approaches to smartphone-based HAR. For this purpose, we systematically searched Scopus, PubMed, and Web of Science for peer-reviewed articles published up to December 2020 on the use of smartphones for HAR. We extracted information on smartphone body location, sensors, and physical activity types studied and the data transformation techniques and classification schemes used for activity recognition. Consequently, we identified 108 articles and described the various approaches used for data acquisition, data preprocessing, feature extraction, and activity classification, identifying the most common practices, and their alternatives. We conclude that smartphones are well-suited for HAR research in the health sciences. For population-level impact, future studies should focus on improving the quality of collected data, address missing data, incorporate more diverse participants and activities, relax requirements about phone placement, provide more complete documentation on study participants, and share the source code of the implemented methods and algorithms.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.