AI-Fairness Towards Activity Recognition of Older Adults
Mohammad Arif Ul Alam
Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell
USA
ABSTRACT
Wireless wearable sensor networks (WSN)-based activity recogni-
tion has implicit impacts on context-aware application and con-
nected health research for older adults. Although, many existing
researches focus on different WSN integration, signal processing
and intelligent detection to recognize different activities, none of
the existing works address the Artificial Intelligence (AI) fairness
in activity recognition of older adults domain. We argue that AI-
fairness towards detecting activities of older adults is different than
to fairness for other protected attributes such as age, gender or race.
The primary reason behind this difference is the diversity of same
activity among different older adults based on their functional abil-
ities (walking using crutches, walker). However, the diversity also
exists among the same older adults based on time and space as well.
The above constraints limit the AI capabilities and causes unfair
detection of daily activities that has potential impacts on healthcare
interventions for older adults. In this paper, we investigate, first of
its kind, AI-fairness of activity recognition for older adults using
a single wearable WSN sensor in presence of diverse disabilities.
In this regard, we (i) employ signal processing and Bi-directional
LSTM model to recognize diverse multi-label activities of older
adults using single WSN; (ii) identify the existence of biases in
activity recognition considering the age and functional ability as
protected attributes; (iii) mitigate the biases by applying different
bias mitigation techniques in different stages (pre-, in- and post-
processing) of machine learning model development; and finally (iv)
we experimentally evaluate the proposed AI-fairness framework
using older adults data collected from a retirement center.
ACM Reference Format:
Mohammad Arif Ul Alam. 2020. AI-Fairness Towards Activity Recognition
of Older Adults. In MobiQuitous 2020 - 17th EAI International Conference
on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services
(MobiQuitous ’20), December 7–9, 2020, Darmstadt, Germany. ACM, New
York, NY, USA, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3448891.3448945
1 INTRODUCTION
A machine learning model makes predictions based on a training
dataset, where many other instances and actual outcomes are pro-
vided. Thus, a machine learning algorithm attempts to find patterns,
or generalizations, in the training dataset to use when a prediction
for a new instance is needed. However, sometimes the patterns that
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https://doi.org/10.1145/3448891.3448945
are found may not be desirable or may even be illegal. For example,
an older adult’s current activity may be detected as ‘standing’ by
AI algorithm while the person is actually ‘walking’ using a walker
due to his functional disability. This type of machine learning pre-
diction biases may be caused due to the lack of protected attribute
information (disability) which violates "United Stats Disability dis-
crimination act - Sect. 504" [1]. On the other hand, single WSN
and Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Human Activity Recognition
(HAR) is becoming an exponentially growing field of research in
the domain of activity learning and reasoning of older adults due to
its high correlations with cognitive and connected health. However,
WSN-based HAR model imposes several challenges.
First, activity recognition frameworks can be constrained in a
sole extreme if single WSN-device has been used. To explain this
challenge, we divided human activities into upper extreme (UE)
(activities relevant to upper part of the body, such as, hand gestures)
and lower extreme (LE) (activities relevant to lower part of the body,
such as, sitting, running) activity domains. For a single WSN-based
activity recognition framework, the model limits its performance
on a sole extreme. As an example, if the device is placed in any of
the LE nodes, it only can quantify LE contexts failing the recogni-
tion of waving hands (UE) activity. To mitigate the above problem,
multiple WSN device-based activity recognition frameworks have
been proposed in past by many researchers [11, 15]. However, older
adult population are reluctant of using multiple body mounted
WSN sensor system which is the most significant barrier of context
recognition based elderly health care.
Second, due to the diverse nature of abilities for the older pop-
ulation, performance pattern of same activity can be significantly
different among older adults which may not be fairly addressed by
AI-framework causing the issue of AI-fairness. Although, people with
65+ of age are considered as older adults in general, this group of
population consists of most diverse pattern of same activity than
the younger ones. The significance of the diversity is so extreme
that, same activity performance pattern changes not only among
different older adults based on their age and functional ability, but
also can be totally different for the same person based on time
and space. For example, the walking pattern of an older adult of
75 years old with no functional disability will be much different
than an older adult of 70 years old with functional disability (needs
assistance of a walker). On the other hand, an older adult with
partial functional disability or no disability can walk normally in
plain space (corridor) but may need assistance of crutches when
she plans to climb stair. The existence of this diversity may cause
the activity recognition framework a bias which must be mitigated
to confirm AI-fairness.
To address the first challenge, we propose a novel utilization of
sparse-deconvolution method on a single wrist-worn WSN device
based hybrid classification method to recognize multiple activities
i.e., both UE and LE contexts. Though we believe that fine-grained
hand gesture and postural activities in conjunction with ambient
sensor values can improve high-level activity performance signifi-
cantly, exploiting multi-label activities from single wrist worn WSN
device is challenging. However, this problem is extremely difficult
in case of diverse types of activities of older adults. For example,
an older adult may use walker, walking stick or nothing as a sup-
port while ‘walking’. In this regard, we assume LE nodes have a
sparse effect (approximate) on UE nodes while both of the nodes
are in motion concurrently. Hence, we assume human body as a
Linear time-invariant (LTI) system where the effects of LE nodes’
movements are considered as input and the noisy UE nodes related
movements are considered as output with a white Gaussian noise.
To address the second challenge, we investigate the bias detec-
tion and mitigation techniques in every stage of machine learning
model development i.e., pre-, in- and post-processing using state-
of-art fairness metrics and bias mitigation algorithms in terms of
activity recognition for older adults with protected attributes (age,
disabilities) and investigate potential best fit of bias mitigation for
fair activity recognition of older adults. So far our knowledge, our
proposed framework is the first of its kind that addresses every
aspect of fairness by detecting and mitigating biases for HAR of
older adults.
2 RELATED WORKS
Our proposed framework stands on the strong foundation of WSN-
based multi-label activity recognition and AI-fairness. Although,
many researchers proposed AI-fairness in different field of research,
none of them proposed the hurdles towards applying AI-fairness
in activity recognition of older adults.
2.1 Wearable Sensor Networks based Activity
Recognition for Older Adults
WSN based activity recognition models have been proposed by
many researchers before [3, 11, 15, 50–52]. A continuous autoen-
coder model has been proposed which exploited multiple body
mounted RFID reader based multi-label activity recognition tech-
nique [3]. Another wearable RFID reader based model has been
proposed that used RFID radio pattern mining to exploit multiple
body mounted activity recognition [11]. Many researchers pro-
posed sparse coding-based wearable sensor signals processing in
the domain of human activity recognition before [6, 7]. A sparse rep-
resentation body-mounted inertial measurement unit system has
been proposed to detect human activities [6]. Many researchers pro-
posed dictionary based sparse representation of wearable sensors as
well [7]. Alam. et. al. proposed a sparse deconvolution method based
feature extraction model and later detect activities from the decon-
voluted signal processing on older adult’s activity recognition [48].
Several researchers proposed multi-label activity recognition frame-
work from multiple body mounted sensors using collaborative [12]
and transfer [8] learning models. However, many researchers in-
vestigated discrete hidden markov model [2], weighted naive bayes
[48], dynamic time warping [5] and artificial neural network [4].
An 18 gesture dictionary based hand-gesture recognition method
has been proposed as well to detect upper extreme activities only
[13]. Wrist-worn ACC sensor signal processing based postural ac-
tivity recognition approach has been proposed using Decision Tree,
2
Random Forest, Support Vector Machines, K-Nearest Neighbors,
Naive Bayes, deep neural networks [3].
2.2 Fairness in AI System
AI-fairness is a human-in-the loop process. Research shows that
by optimizing for the sole aim of accuracy improvement, ML algo-
rithms trained on historical data not only replicate, but may amplify
existing biases or discrimination [24]. The most popular definition
of AI-fairness is: ‘discrimination is considered to be present if for
two individuals that have the same characteristic relevant to the
decision making and differ only in the sensitive attribute (e.g., gen-
der/race) a model results in different decisions’ [16]. Deployment
of unfair AI systems may have disparate impact, practices which
adversely affect people of one protected characteristic more than
anothe [16, 17]. The reasons behind the unfairness includes biased
sampling, incorrect labeling (especially with subjective labeling),
biased representation (e.g., incomplete or correlated features), sub-
optimal or insensitive optimization algorithm, shift of population
or data distribution, and failure to consider domain-specific, le-
gal, or ethical constraints [16, 18]. Although the effect of bias is
observed only in the outcome, the bias could be inherent in the
training, preprocessing, or even in the modeling procedure. There
have been multiple techniques proposed by many researchers to
address these causes of ’unfair AI methods’ [18–22]. For example
[16] proposed techniques to de-bias data by modifying labels of the
training data, duplicating or deleting instances, adding synthetic
instances, and transforming data into a new representation space.
[23] proposed data de-biasing method that applies a preprocessor to
transform the data resulting a new training dataset which is more
fair than the original one while also limiting local deformations
from the data transformation. The above de-biasing techniques are
normative by nature, i.e., they rely on prescriptively defining the
criteria of fairness in order to optimize for that criteria. A recent
paper pursued a complementary descriptive approach by empiri-
cally studying how people judge the fairness of features used by a
decision support system in the criminal justice system [17]. Their
study uncovered the underlying dimensions in people’s reasoning
of algorithmic fairness, and demonstrated individuals’ variations
on these dimensions.
Segmentation
Bias Detection
Feature Extraction
Bias mitigation
Empatica E4 Motion Deconvolution
Smart Home
Environment
Creation
Clinical Disability Deep Learning
Assessment Training Explanation
Older Adults Data Testing
Recruitment
Target
Smart Home Data Collection Activity Recognition AI-Fairness
Figure 1: Overall System Architecture
3 SYSTEM OVERVIEW
Fig 1 illustrates a schematic diagram of our developed system ar-
chitecture which consists of four components:
3.1 Smart Environment Creation
For an ideal IoT-based system, instrumenting and deploying it at
each participant’s natural living environment warrants for assem-
bling a flexible set of hardware and software interfaces to ease the
system configuration, setup, and network discovery processes. The
sensor system placed in the residences of volunteers needs to meet
several specific physiological signals and activity monitoring needs.
However, we must confirm that the devices are reliable with po-
tential for re-deployment as well as appear unintimidating to the
participants. Inspired by the above requirements, we developed a
real testbed IoT system, SenseBox, by customizing Cloud Engine
PogoPlug Mobile base station firmware to integrate with WiFi (con-
nect ambient and object sensors) and Bluetooth (connect wristband)
protocol. The smart home components are as follows: (i) PogoPlug
base server with a continuous power supply, (ii) 3 binary Passive
Infrared sensors in three different rooms (kitchen, livingroom and
bedroom) to capture room level occupancy, (iii) 7 binary object
sensors attached with closet door, entry door, telephone, broom,
laundry basket, trash can and trash box, (iv) three IP cameras in
the appropriate positions to collect the ground truth data and (v)
an Empatica E4 [10] wrist-band (integrated sensors: PPG at 64 Hz,
EDA at 4 Hz, Body temperature at 1 Hz and a triaxial ACC at 32
Hz) on the participant’s dominating hand.
3.2 Demographic Ground Truth Data
Collection for older adults with disabilities
Currently in standard clinical practice and research, the most ac-
curate evaluations of cognitive health assessment are one-to-one
observation and supervision tasks/questionnaires for monitoring
an individual’s functional abilities and behavior [27]. In the first
stage of this pilot study, we have investigated current literatures
and carefully chosen the clinically proven functional and behavioral
health assessment survey tools [27]. On the other hand, to cross
check with the survey based evaluations, we have also chosen clin-
ically justified observation based behavioral assessment methods.
First, following the resident consent, our clinical research evalu-
ator collects demographic and descriptive data (age, gender, race,
ethnicity, marital status, education and medical commodities). She
has performed two types of clinical assessments: (1) Observation
based where the resident’s cognition is assessed using the Saint
Louis University Mental Status (SLUMS) scale [25]. (2) Survey based
where five widely used and clinically well validated surveys are
taken into account: (a) Yale Physical Activity Survey [28]; (b) Lawton
Instrumental Activities of Daily Living; (c) Barthel Index of Activities
of Daily Living [29]; (d) Geriatric Depression Rating scale [31]; and
(e) Zung Self-Rating Anxiety scale [32].
3.3 Activity Recognition
This module consists of: (i) Feature extraction: We first pre-process
the sensor signal with different band pass filters and extract statis-
tical features; (ii) Multi-Label Activity Recognition: This module
consists of several sub-modules. First, using extracted features from
the previous module, we generate 8-hand gesture dictionary and
apply sparse deconvolution method to extract approximately sparse
factor signal which has been presented as postural activity response
signal; (iii) Multi-Label Activity Recognition: This module combines
3
and maps hand gestural and postural activities signals extracted
from previous method and feed into a multi-label activity repre-
sentation using a multi-input multi-task recurrent neural network
(MM-RNN).
3.4 AI Fairness
This module consists of bias detection and mitigation in every stage
of machine learning model from pre-, in- and post-processing as
well as explanation to confirm AI-fairness of older adults towards
activity recognition considering different disability status of older
adults as protective attributes.
4 SINGLE WEARABLE WSN-BASED
MULTI-LABEL ACTIVITY RECOGNITION
In this paper, we solve the problem of exploiting multiple body
sensor node contexts from single body mounted IMU and show
that it outperforms baseline methods both in usual and diverse
types of activities. More specifically, we exploit lower extreme node
contexts from a single IMU mounted on any of upper extreme body
nodes.
4.1 Hypothesis
For this broader perspective, we define some hypotheses as follows:
Hypothesis 1. Each of the human body node is associated with
different context sets.
For example, knee mounted sensor node is associated with walk-
ing, sitting and standing, but wrist mounted sensor node is associ-
ated with clapping, waving, shaking etc.
Hypothesis 2. Upper extreme contexts can be affected by lower
extreme contexts with an approximately sparse factor (ASF) but cannot
be happened in vice versa.
We can define human body contexts in two extremes: (1) Upper
extreme (UE) contexts which are involved with the activities per-
formed by the upper parts of the body above the waist, such as waist
bending, hand clapping, hand shaking etc.; and (2) Lower extreme
(LE) contexts, which are associated with the activities performed
by the lower parts of the body such as, walking, sitting, standing
etc. While performing daily activities, lower parts of the body act
as base of entire body. Thus any movements in the lower parts of
human body affect the entire body including the UE node mounted
IMU signals. We hypothesize that this effect is approximately sparse.
For example, wrist mounted sensor signals at waving hand (UE)
in standing (LE) posture is different than waving hand in running
posture. On the other hand, waving hand, hand clapping, hand
shaking etc. do not affect on knee mounted IMU signals.
Hypothesis 3. Approximately sparse factor (ASF) signal has ap-
proximately similar task with lower extreme task set but with different
distribution.
Since the ASF signal is the effect of LE contexts, it shares similar
tasks with the lower extreme context sets with different distribu-
tion. But this augmentation imposes a limitation: ASF signal cannot
differentiate between LE contexts sitting and standing since both
of them do not affect the UE WSN signals at all. To solve the prob-
lem, we divide LE context sets into two major categories: (1) static
context, and (2) dynamic context. Static contexts such as standing,
sitting and lying, have no effect on UE WSN signals while dynamic
contexts such as walking, running and cycling, have a near sparse
effect on UE WSN signals. We can consider human body as a LTI
system where a single IMU is mounted on a node of UE body parts.
The aggregated IMU signal at UE WSN is a convolution of approxi-
mately sparse factor (ASF) of LE contexts and original UE contexts.
Thus, we hypothesize that we can apply a sparse deconvolution
method on the IMU signal to disaggregate both of the signals.
4.1.1 Evaluation of Hypotheses and Proof of Concept. We recruit
5 participants (in the age group of 25-35) and collect one hour of
wrist worn ACC sensor data for each three scenarios (D1, D2 and
D3) in a staged experiment. Two graduate students are recruited
to annotate and validate the ground truth on the videos. We apply
above mentioned sparse deconvolution method on D3 dataset to
extract ASF signals (with 23% signal reconstruction error) and ex-
tract features (ACC feature extraction without high-band pass filter)
with 2.1 seconds segments. We train SMO based SVM classification
algorithm [42] for postural activity recognition and evaluate the
results with 10-fold cross validation. Our classification for hand
gesture detection achieves 98.3% accuracy (FP rate 0.5%, Precision
98.5%). While without any deconvolution method the wrist worn
ACC sensor based postural activity recognition accuracy stagnates
at 60.48% (FP rate 19.9%, precision 61.8% recall 60.5% ROC area
79.8%, our novel deconvolution based technique improves the ac-
curacy to 83.9% (FP rate 8.1%, precision 84.0% recall 84% ROC area
95.7%).
4.2 Hand Gesture Signal Separation
We consider the recognition problem as an activity tuple of ⟨дesture,
posture, ambient, object⟩. Though, our previous work provides sig-
nificant performance improvement for single wrist-worn ACC sen-
sor aided 18-hand gesture based postural activity recognition in lab
environment [47, 49, 53, 54], it faces some practical challenges in
real-time smart environment with older adults due to the diversity
of their postures. For example, some older adults use walker, double
walking sticks or wheel chair for walking in which cases collecting
18 hand gestures and corresponding postural activities for training
requires endless efforts and carefulness. To reduce the complexity of
ground truth labeling, we use rotational normalization method that
can merge some hand-gestures subject to directional differences
and forms an 8-hand gesture model.
Figure 2: 8 hand gesture dictionary with direction
We propose a 8-gesture dictionary (as shown in Fig. 2) towards
separating hand-gestural related components of single WSN signal
towards recognizing hand gestures. The method comprises of the
following steps: (i) Preprocessing: wrist-worn ACC sensor provided
3-axis data are passed through 0.4Hz low-pass filter to remove the
data drift. (ii) Rotation normalization: Normalizing the rotation of
hand gestures provides greater accuracy and allows for more real-
istic, orientation-independent motion. At first, we find the best fit
plane of the acceleration vectors thus if the motion lies in a single
4
plane, then the acceleration vectors of a closed shape should on
average lie in that main plane. Then, we take all acceleration seg-
ments between points of inflection to form one single vector called
reference vector that provides us the general direction of user’s mo-
tion. After that, each vector is normalized relative to the reference
vector. This normalization helps remove a lot of hand gestures from
prior considered 18 hand gestures resulting a reduced dictionary of
8 gestures. As a final outcome, we have a fine-grained component
of WSN signal that represents hand-gesture signal responses.
4.3 Postural Activity Signal Separation using
Sparse Deconvolution
In normal lab environment, wrist-worn ACC sensor signal is a
mixture (convolution) of actual hand gesture and postural activity
relevant signals [49]. We improve the idea by reducing the number
of hand gestures and postural activities to 8 (as shown in Fig.2)
using rotation normalization and 4 (walking, sitting, standing and
lying). Then, we use sparse-deconvolution method (with 31% signal
reconstruction error) to get Approximately Sparse Factor. We first
consider the wrist-worn ACC sensor signals (3-axis values) as a
convolution of hand gesture and postural activity effects and build
a deconvolution framework. The deconvolution framework takes a
known signal (hand gesture effects) and a equalizer parameter (λ) as
input and provides an Approximately Sparse Factor signal (postural
activity effects) as output. For 3-axis ACC signals, we need to learn
associated 3 equalizer parameters for each hand gesture. Moreover,
each equalizer parameter is involved with 4 postural activities that
results a total 96 (8 × 3 × 4) equalizer parameters to learn. After
separating the hand gesture related signal component following the
method explained in Sec. 4.2, we take the corresponding reference
vector as known signal and extract the Approximately Sparse Factor
signals incorporating corresponding 3 equalizer parameters (λ) for
the sparse-deconvolution method. Fig. 3 illustrates a single axis
example of the deconvolution signal outcomes for waving hand
gesture and walking signal.
Sample hand gesture
30
X-axis
X-axis reference
Axis value
20
Extracted ASF Signal
10
0
1 31 61 91 121 151 181 211 241
Time (milli seconds)
Figure 3: Sample deconvolution example of X-axis. The raw
x-axis of accelerometer signal, reference vector of the sam-
ple gesture and the extracted corresponding ASF signal of
walking.

Figure 4: Schematic diagram of deep Learning based multi-
label activity recognition framework.
4.4 Multi-Label Activity Recognition via Deep
Learning
From Sections 4.2 and 4.3, we can separate two signals from sin-
gle WSN-based tri-axis accelerometer worn in wrist of users. We
use Multi-Task Recurrent Neural Network [33] model that takes
two separated signals (hand gesture and posture) and outputs two
co-occurring labels (hand gesture and posture) considering two
task models, hand gesture recognition task and posture recogni-
tion task. We use end-to-end Multi-Task RNN framework based
on Joint Classification-Classification RNN, inspired from [33]. Liu
et. al. originally proposed to use a joint Classification-Regression
RNN that we convert into joint classification-classification RNN
in multi-input multi-task RNN (MM-RNN). It contains four major
components as displayed in Fig 4, (i) two time-series input signals
(hand gesture and posture) from the deconvolution methods; (ii)
three stacked LSTM layers, (iii) one hand gesture classification sub-
network ;and (iv) a posture classification subnetwork. LSTM is an
advanced RNN network which is widely used for extracting frame
level action features and learning the long-range dependencies of
a temporal sequence. To be specific, the network is constructed
by three LSTM layers and three non-linear fully-connected (FC)
layers. Those FC layers act as a role of feed-forward layers for
robust feature learning. A cumulative classification loss has been
developed by adding hand gesture and posture sub-network losses
to the learning objective, in order to perform both hand gesture
and postural activity recognition:
L(V ) = Lд (V ) + λLp (V )
where Lд (V ) and Lp (V ) are the hand gesture and posture classifi-
cation losses. λ is constant value.
Here the loss can be defined as follows
N −1 3×N
1 Õ Õ
L(V ) = − zt ,k lnP(yt ;k |v 0, ..vt );
N t
k =0
where M is the number of all action classes, and zt ,k corresponds
to the score of frame vt for class k. When k is the ground truth
label, zt ,k sets to 1. For the other action classes, the score is zero.
5 BIAS DETECTION AND BIAS MITIGATION
Bias mitigation or AI-fairness algorithms attempt to improve the
fairness metrics by modifying the training data, the learning al-
gorithm, and/or the predictions. These algorithm categories are
known as pre-processing, in-processing, and post-processing, re-
spectively [46].
5.1 Bias mitigation approaches
The bias mitigation algorithm categories are based on the location
where these algorithms can intervene in a complete machine learn-
ing pipeline. If the algorithm is allowed to modify the training data,
then pre-processing can be used. If it is allowed to change the learn-
ing procedure for a machine learning model, then in-processing can
be used. If the algorithm can only treat the learned model as a black
box without any ability to modify the training data or learning al-
gorithm, then only post-processing can be used. We use AI-fairness
360 module to investigate bias mitigation approaches on activity
recognition of older adults given their disability status (functional,
behavioral and cognitive) as protected attributes [34].
5.1.1 Pre-processing algorithms. Reweighing [35] generates weights
for the training examples in each (group, label) combination differ-
ently to ensure fairness before classification. Optimized preprocess-
ing [36] learns a probabilistic transformation that edits the features
and labels in the data with group fairness, individual distortion,
and data fidelity constraints and objectives. Learning fair represen-
tations [37] finds a latent representation that encodes the data well
but obfuscates information about protected attributes. Disparate
impact remover [38] edits feature values to increase group fairness
while preserving rank-ordering within groups.
5.1.2 In-processing algorithms. Adversarial debiasing [39] learns
a classifier to maximize prediction accuracy and simultaneously
reduce an adversarys ability to determine the protected attribute
from the predictions. This approach leads to a fair classifier as
the predictions cannot carry any group discrimination informa-
tion that the adversary can exploit. Prejudice remover [40] adds a
discrimination-aware regularization term to the learning objective.
5.1.3 Post-processing algorithms. Equalized odds postprocessing
[30] solves a linear program to find probabilities with which to
change output labels to optimize equalized odds. Calibrated equal-
ized odds postprocessing [26] optimizes over calibrated classifier
score outputs to find probabilities with which to change output
labels with an equalized odds objective. Reject option classification
([35] ) gives favorable outcomes to unprivileged groups and unfa-
(1) vorable outcomes to privileged groups in a confidence band around
the decision boundary with the highest uncertainty.
6 EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION OF
ACTIVITY RECOGNITION
(2) To further evaluate our proposed sparse deconvolution guided
multi-label human activity recognition model and AI-fairness, we
have used one real-time datasets collected from a retirement com-
munity center (RCC) with appropriate IRB approval.
6.1 Data Collection
We recruited 22 participants for this study (19 females and 3 males)
with age range from 77-93 (mean 85.5, std 3.92) from a continuing
care retirement community with the appropriate institutional IRB
approval and signed consent. Participants are given a wrist band
to wear on their dominant hand. The participants are instructed to
perform 13 scripted ADLs (excluded from this study). These scripted
5
 Table 1: Feature Subsets
Survey Distribution of Assessments (Total 22)
SLUMS Cognitive Decline NCI 5, MCI 7, CI 10
ZUNG Anxiety highly anxious 3, mild anxious 5, not anxious 14
Yale functional ability functionally able 17, disable 5
GDS Depression highly depressed 4, mild depressed 7, Not depressed 11
ADLs consist of different combination of 4 postural (‘walking’, ‘sit-
ting’, ‘standing’ and ‘lying’) and 8 hand gestural (as shown in Fig. 2)
activities. We record the entire session with IP Video camera for
ground truth annotation. Two trained and IRB recruitment ap-
proved graduate students are engaged to annotate postural and
hand gestural activities. Two more graduate students are engaged
to validate the annotations on the videos. The gender diversity in
the recruited participants reflects the gender distribution (85% fe-
male and 15% male) in the retirement community facility. A trained
gerontology graduate student evaluator completes surveys with
participants to fill out the surveys. Participants are given a wrist
band to wear on their dominant hand, and concurrently another
trained IT graduate student have the IoT system setup in partic-
ipants’ own living environment (setup time 15-30 minutes). The
participants are instructed to perform 13 complex ADLs. Another
project member remotely monitors the sensor readings, videos and
system failure status. The entire session lasts from 2-4 hours of
time depending on participants’ physical and cognitive ability.
We follow the standard protocol to annotate demographics and
activities mentioned in the IRB. Two graduate students are en-
gaged to annotate activities (postural, gestural and complex activ-
ity) whereas the observed activity performances are computed by
the evaluator. Two more graduate students are engaged to validate
the annotations on the videos. In overall, we are able to annotate
13 complex activities (total 291 samples) labeling for each partici-
pant; 8 hand gestures (total 43561 samples) and 4 postural activities
(total 43561 samples) labeling. Annotation of postural and complex
activities outcomes no difficulties from recorded videos. However,
annotation of hand-gestures is extremely difficult in our scenario.
We used video based hand tracker that can track and sketch wrist
movements from a video episode [9]. This sketching can help us
significantly to identify which particular hand gesture is being per-
formed in the time segment. From our 6 demographics surveys, we
find significant distributions in terms of cognition only for SLUMS
Score (S-Score). Based on that, we divide our participants pool into
three groups: Not Cognitively Impaired (NCI), Mild Cognitively Im-
paired (MCI) and Cognitively Impaired (CI) where the number of
participants are 5, 7 and 10 respectively. Table 1 shows the distribu-
tion of population in terms of age and disabilities as per different
clinical surveys.
6.2 Multi-Label Activity Recognition Results
Analysis
We consider hidden markov model [41], support vector machine by
Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) [42] and Feature Weighted
Naive Bayes (FWNB) [43] as our baseline algorithms and compared
with our proposed MM-RNN model performance. We use activity
recognition accuracy measure as stated bellow:
TP +TN
Accuracy =
TP + T N + FP + FN
where T P,T N , F P and F N represent true positive, true negative,
false positive and false negative measures respectively.
For hand gestural activity recognition, we extract accelerometer
features and impute into our MM-RNN model. We measure cross-
participant accuracy using leave-two-participants-out method, i.e.,
we take out two of the participants’ data points from the entire
dataset, train the hand gesture dictionary of MM-RNN classification
model, test the model accuracy on the two left-out participants
relevant data points, and finally continue the process for entire
dataset. For hand gestural activity recognition our leave-two-out
participants method outcomes 96.7% accuracy (FP rate 0.9%). For
postural activity recognition, MM-RNN model provides an accuracy
of 97.5% postural activity recognition accuracy (FP rate 2.1%). Fig.
5 and Fig. 6 show that accuracy improvement comparing to the
baseline methods.
Fig 5 displays MM-RNN based 8-hand gestural activity recog-
nition accuracies comparisons with the baseline methods which
clearly depicts the outperformance of our method (2.3% improve-
ment). For postural activity recognition, our framework achieves
97.6% postural activity recognition accuracy which outperforms
the baseline approach significantly (2.2% improvement).
7 AI FAIRNESS ANALYSIS
When AI approaches are used to support communication based
on speech, writing, or gestures, the primary fairness concern is
algorithmic fairness. The models should work equally well for
members of different groups. For example, a speech recognition
system should work as well for women speech as it does for that
of men. Depending on the application, AI methods may be inaccu-
rate, or simply not work at all for some individuals because their
appearance, speech or behavior are outside the AI’s training data.
This aspect of fairness can be improved by gathering training data
from a broad set of groups, and ensuring the process of ‘cleaning’
the data retains enough diversity. However, it is possible that using
more diverse training data can degrade the overall performance of
some models. In such cases it may be necessary to build special-
ized models for known groups, such as recognition of deaf speech.
Researchers should explore methods to correctly handle data gen-
erated by outlier individuals and groups who speak, write, look, or
behave differently from the average person.
7.1 Allocating Fairness Group
For algorithms that allocate people to favored or less favored groups,
many researchers have explored different ways of measuring and
ensuring fairness in how the favorable outcomes are assigned
([22, 44]). However, the biggest question would be, what defini-
tion of fairness should be preferred in the disability space? Here,
we address this question by examining some of the commonly used
approaches, and their strengths and weaknesses. In this regard, we
split the postural activity "walking" into 3 diverse styles based on
the functional disability status of older adults: ‘normal walking’,
‘walking with walker’, ‘walking with single stick’. Then, we run the
algorithms one more time and found that the accuracy went down
to 88% (FP 7.9%) for our proposed MM-RNN framework as shown
in Fig. 7. This accuracy drop raises a serious concern of fairness
(3) depending on the disability status of older adults. To understand the
6
 100
100 100

95 90

Accuracy (%)
95
90 80
90
85 Our Approach
85 70
80 Baseline Method
80 HMM SMO FWNB MM-RNN
75 60

lying
sitting

Overall
standing
normal walking
walking with walker
walking with stick
HMM SMO FWNB MM-RNN 75
70
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Overall
HMM 79.5 92.3 93.5 78.4 87.1 90 75.1 90.1 86.6 70
standing sitting walking lying Overall
SMO 84.3 93 84.6 83.6 89.2 92.6 79.5 93.7 89.87
HMM 82.6 85.7 89.6 84.7 87.5
FWNB 89.2 98 95.2 88.2 91.6 95.1 84.7 96.5 93.5
MM-RNN 91.3 99 97.5 92.8 95.3 94.6 90.2 97.7 96.7 SMO 85.7 86.8 91.5 89.4 90.2
FWNB 92.5 95.4 94.8 96.5 95.3
MM-RNN 95.8 98.5 96.4 99.8 97.6

Figure 7: 6-class postural ac-

Figure 5: MM-RNN classification accuracy com- Figure 6: 4-class postural level activity recog-
tivity recognition accuracy
parisons with baseline approaches (graphical nition performance of our MM-RNN and com-
comparisons with FWNB
signatures of all hand gestures are shown). parisons with baseline method
method.

fairness of the prediction, we further analyze the data in terms of
protected attributes. However, all of the participants use the above
walking style occasionally based on their temporary disabilities
or simply to feel comfortable or safe. This situation imposes ex-
tremely difficult situation to confirm AI-fairness in this domain. As
all of the prior AI-fairness i.e. bias mitigation algorithms rely on
the protected attributes which are, in our case, age and disability
status (functional, behavioral and cognitive), we a list of protected
attributes based on evaluation using clinical surveys and clinical
observational tools. Table 2 illustrates the detail accuracy measures
for all possible protected attributes.
From Table 2, it can be depicted that functional ability (Able/Disable)
and Age (<80 or >80) are more powerful protected attributes in
terms of activity recognition biases for older adults. Also, it can
be easily depicted that, normal walking with no supporting tools
(walking with nothing in 6-class activities) is highest accurate for
AI prediction while with walker and stick supported walking ac-
tivities result much lower accurate for AI prediction. Apart from
that, we excluded race and gender protected attributes due to their
non-existence of disparity. We also did not display accuracy im-
pacts on‘lying’, ‘sitting’ and ‘standing’ considering biases, because
we could find significant disparity in these cases as well. However,
each of the activity accuracy presented in the Table 2 generated
results including these three activities in the classifier.
7.2 Bias Detection
To detect bias, at first we need to set protected attributes. An at-
tribute that partitions a population into groups whose outcomes
should have parity. Examples include race, gender, caste, and reli-
gion. Protected attributes are not universal, but are application
specific. In our case, the protected attributes are (i) Age (priv-
ileged ’age<80’ and unprivileged ’age>80’); (ii) Functional abil-
ity (privileged ‘able’ and unprivileged ‘disable’); and (iii) Walking
Style (privileged ‘with nothing’ and unprivileged ‘with something
(walker/stick)’). To detect AI biases, we define 4different bias met-
rics as follows:
(1) Statistical Parity Difference: which is computed as the
difference of the rate of favorable outcomes received by the
unprivileged group to the privileged group. The ideal value
of this metric is 0. Fairness for this metric is between -0.1
and 0.1 [22].
7
(2) Equal Opportunity Difference: which computed as the
difference of true positive rates between the unprivileged
and the privileged groups. The true positive rate is the ratio
of true positives to the total number of actual positives for
a given group. The ideal value is 0. A value of < 0 implies
higher benefit for the privileged group and a value > 0 implies
higher benefit for the unprivileged group. Fairness for this
metric is between -0.1 and 0.1 [45].
(3) Average Odds Difference which is computed as average
difference of false positive rate (false positives / negatives)
and true positive rate (true positives / positives) between
unprivileged and privileged groups. The ideal value of this
metric is 0. A value of < 0 implies higher benefit for the
privileged group and a value > 0 implies higher benefit for
the unprivileged group. Fairness for this metric is between
-0.1 and 0.1 .
(4) Disparate Impact which is computed as the ratio of rate
of favorable outcome for the unprivileged group to that of
the privileged group. The ideal value of this metric is 1.0
A value < 1 implies higher benefit for the privileged group
and a value >1 implies a higher benefit for the unprivileged
group. Fairness for this metric is between 0.8 and 1.2.
7.3 Bias Mitigation
To evaluate AI-fairness and select appropriate bias mitigation algo-
rithm, we first implemented 8 different bias mitigation algorithms:
(1) Reweighing that eights the examples in each (group, label)
combination differently to ensure fairness before classifica-
tion).
(2) Adversarial Debiasing that learns a classifier that maxi-
mizes prediction accuracy and simultaneously reduces an
adversary’s ability to determine the protected attribute from
the predictions.
(3) Reject Option Based Classification that changes predic-
tions from a classifier to make them fairer by providing
favorable outcomes to unprivileged groups and unfavorable
outcomes to privileged groups in a confidence band around
the decision boundary with the highest uncertainty
(4) equalized odds post processing identifies conditions on
the perturbation that guarantee that the bias of a classifier is
 Table 2: Walking activity recognition performances (% Accuracy) in term of protected attributes using our MM-RNN model

Walking Style Age<80 Age>80 Able Disable No Mild Deme- highly mild Not highly mild not
De- De- ntia de- de- de- anx- anx- anx-
men- men- pressed pressed pressed ious ious ious
tia tia
4-Class
Walking 99.5 90.3 100 86.7 98.5 90.1 95.3 95.3 97.8 96.4 97.2 97.5 96.0
6-Class
With nothing 100 100 99.8 96.5 99.3 98.4 99.1 100 98.5 98.5 98.9 99.6 98.4
With walker 86.3 80.6 88.7 80.7 89.5 85.8 83.6 87.5 89.4 82.2 89.3 84.6 87.3
With stick 90.3 85.5 91.5 84.6 90.4 93.0 95.6 93.8 97.4 95.5 93.3 90.2 89.7

Reweighing Prejudice remover Disparate impact remover Learning fair representation

Adversarial Debiasing Equal odds Calibrated equal odds Rejection option classification
postprocessing postprocessing

1 1 1 1
Balanced Accuracy

0.95 0.95 0.95 0.95

0.9 0.9 0.9 0.9

0.85 0.85 0.85 0.85

0.8 0.8 0.8 0.8

-0.4 -0.3 -0.2 -0.1 0 0.1 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 -0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6
1 Statistical parity difference 1 Statistical parity difference 1 Statistical parity difference 1 Statistical parity difference
Balanced Accuracy

0.95 0.95 0.95 0.95

0.9 0.9 0.9 0.9

0.85 0.85 0.85 0.85

0.8 0.8 0.8 0.8

-0.4 -0.3 -0.2 -0.1 0 0.1 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 -0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6
Statistical parity difference Disparate Impact Average Odds Difference Equal Opportunity Difference

Figure 8: Fairness vs. Balanced Accuracy before (top panel) and after (bottom panel) applying various bias mitigation algo-
rithms. Four different fairness metrics are shown with MM-RNN classifier used. The ideal fair value of disparate impact is 1,
whereas for all other metrics it is 0. The circles indicate the mean value and bars indicate the extent of ± 1 standard deviation.
Protected attribute ‘Age’

reduced even by running equalized odds with the perturbed Fig 9 displays the bias mitigation experiment results for protected
attribute [30]. attribute ‘Disability Status’ (privileged ’able’, unprivileged ’disable’).
(5) Disparate impact remover edits feature values increase From the evaluation illustrated in Fig 8 and Fig 9 , we derived Table
group fairness while preserving rank-ordering within groups 3 and Table 4 for protected attributes ‘Age’ and ‘Disability Status’
[38]. respectively where we presented accuracy drop and fairness im-
(6) Learning fair representation [22]. provement among 4 bias metrics (as per prior definition). If the new
(7) Calibrated equalized odds postprocessing [26] fairness is 4 out 4, then there are no biases exist after mitigation.
(8) Prejudice remover [40]’ We would like to find the bias mitigation algorithm that provides
maximum fairness with least possible accuracy drop. In this regard,
from Table 3 (protected attribute ‘Age’) we can see that ‘Rejection
7.4 Bias Evaluation Option’ and ‘Disparate impact remover’ algorithms provided fair
We implemented 4 bias metrics and applied each bias metric asso- prediction while ‘Rejection Option’ provided least accuracy drop
ciated with each bias mitigation algorithm on each protected at- (0.5% < 2.2% ). On the other hand, from Table 4 (protected attribute
tribute (age and disability status). Fig 8 displays the bias mitigation ‘Disability status’), we can see that ‘Reweighing’ and ‘Disparate im-
experiment results for protected attribute ‘Age’ (privileged age<80, pact remover’ algorithms provided fair prediction while ‘Disparate
unprivileged age>80) in details where we used MM-RNN as our impact remover’ provided least accuracy drop (2.5% < 5.5% ).
classifier with 4-class (walking, sitting, standing and lying) postural
and 8 class hand gesture activity recognition accuracy as overall
balanced accuracy measure. The figures of Fig 8 show the detected 8 CONCLUSION
biases in terms of 4 bias metrics while the bottom figures show In this paper, we tried to identify optimal bias mitigation algorithms
the detected biases in after bias mitigation algorithms. Similarly to tackle age and disability biases of older adults towards activity
8
 Reweighing Prejudice remover Disparate impact remover Learning fair representation
Adversarial Debiasing Equal odds Calibrated equal odds Rejection option classification
postprocessing postprocessing

Balanced Accuracy 1 1 1 1

0.95 0.95 0.95 0.95

0.9 0.9 0.9 0.9

0.85 0.85 0.85 0.85

0.8 0.8 0.8 0.8

-0.4 -0.3 -0.2 -0.1 0 0.1 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 -0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6
1 Statistical parity difference 1 Statistical parity difference 1 Statistical parity difference 1 Statistical parity difference
Balanced Accuracy

0.95 0.95 0.95 0.95

0.9 0.9 0.9 0.9

0.85 0.85 0.85 0.85

0.8 0.8 0.8 0.8

-0.4 -0.3 -0.2 -0.1 0 0.1 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 -0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6
Statistical parity difference Disparate Impact Average Odds Difference Equal Opportunity Difference

Figure 9: Fairness vs. Balanced Accuracy before (top panel) and after (bottom panel) applying various bias mitigation algo-
rithms. Four different fairness metrics are shown with MM-RNN classifier used. The ideal fair value of disparate impact is 1,
whereas for all other metrics it is 0. The circles indicate the mean value and bars indicate the extent of ± 1 standard deviation.
Protected attribute ‘Disability Status’

Table 3: Average accuracy drop per mitigation algorithm for biases on AI-based activity recognition of older adults has received
protected attribute ‘Age’ and their corresponding fairness in- little attention in the research literature to date. Our proposed study
dication improvements out of 4 bias metrics (before →− after) is the first of its kind that addressed single WSN based multi-label
diverse activity recognition for older adults as well as studied bias
Algorithm Accuracy Fair detection and mitigation techniques on this domain. In future, we
Reweighing 3.5% →3
0− aim to explain the activity predictions using explainable AI (XAI)
Adversarial Debiasing 2.6% →3
1− models to confirm broader fairness along with biases checking and
Reject Option 0.5% →4
2− mitigation for older adults’ activity recognition in presence of age
Equalized odds 3.1% →1
0− and disability status biases. Additionally, we aim to identify gait
Disparate impact remover 2.2% →4
1− pattern recognition biases in terms of in-, pre- and post-processing
Learning fair representation 4.5% →2
0− of AI-fairness towards developing a robust and fair single wearable
Calibrated equalized odds 2.1% →2
0− WSN activity recognition of older adults.
Prejudice remover 1.5% →3
1−
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