Adar: Adversarial activity recognition in wearables

Recent advances in machine learning and deep neural networks have led to the realization of many important applications in the area of personalized medicine. Whether it is detecting activities of daily living or analyzing images for cancerous cells, machine learning algorithms have become the dominant choice for such emerging applications. In particular, the state-of-the-art algorithms used for human activity recognition (HAR) using wearable inertial sensors utilize machine learning algorithms to detect health events and to make predictions from sensor data. Currently, however, there remains a gap in research on whether or not and how activity recognition algorithms may become the subject of adversarial attacks. In this paper, we take the first strides on (1) investigating methods of generating adversarial example in the context of HAR systems; (2) studying the vulnerability of activity recognition models to adversarial examples in feature and signal domain; and (3) investigating the effects of adversarial training on HAR systems. We introduce Adar¹¹Software code and experimental data for Adar are available online at https://github.com/rameshKrSah/Adar., a novel computational framework for optimization-driven creation of adversarial examples in sensor-based activity recognition systems. Through extensive analysis based on real sensor data collected with human subjects, we found that simple evasion attacks are able to decrease the accuracy of a deep neural network from 95.1% to 3.4% and from 93.1% to 16.8% in the case of a convolutional neural network. With adversarial training, the robustness of the deep neural network increased on the adversarial examples by 49.1% in the worst case while the accuracy on clean samples decreased by 13.2%.