Human Activity Recognition for the Identification of Bullying and Cyberbullying Using Smartphone Sensors

The smartphone is an excellent source of data; it is possible to extrapolate smartphone sensor values and, through Machine Learning approaches, perform anomaly detection analysis characterized by human behavior. This work exploits Human Activity Recognition (HAR) models and techniques to identify human activity performed while filling out a questionnaire via a smartphone application, which aims to classify users as Bullying, Cyberbullying, Victims of Bullying, and Victims of Cyberbullying. The purpose of the work is to discuss a new smartphone methodology that combines the final label elicited from the cyberbullying/bullying questionnaire (Bully, Cyberbully, Bullying Victim, and Cyberbullying Victim) and the human activity performed (Human Activity Recognition) while the individual fills out the questionnaire. The paper starts with a state-of-the-art analysis of HAR to arrive at the design of a model that could recognize everyday life actions and discriminate them from actions resulting from alleged bullying activities. Five activities were considered for recognition: Walking, Jumping, Sitting, Running and Falling. The best HAR activity identification model then is applied to the Dataset derived from the “Smartphone Questionnaire Application” experiment to perform the analysis previously described.