Towards Field-Deployable Wearable IMU Systems for Occupational Activity Recognition

Abstract

Wearable inertial measurement unit (IMU) systems for construction worker human activity recognition (HAR) routinely report aggregate accuracies above 95 %, rarely under genuine subject-independent (leave-one-subject-out (LOSO)) evaluation, masking the per-individual variance that determines real-world deployment performance. Using the VTT-ConIoT benchmark, we conduct, to our knowledge, the first systematic configuration sensitivity analysis of this dataset: six classifiers across five sensor placements and three window sizes under a single LOSO protocol, a personalised-calibration pilot, and a validated comparison of tabular GAN-based and standard time-series augmentation. Per-subject LOSO accuracy for the main multi-sensor, 16-class configuration ranges from 61.9 % to 88.7 % (mean 77.5 %), a 27 pp spread, though all data are laboratory-collected. Multi-sensor fusion and longer windows both improve accuracy; standard augmentation gives small, consistent gains, while Conditional Tabular GAN (CTGAN) augmentation actively harms accuracy with a demonstrated distributional-fidelity mechanism; and personalised calibration recovers 16.8 pp for the weakest participants from just 30 % of their own data. These findings provide evidence-grounded configuration guidance for scaling occupational body sensor networks towards field deployment