MicroBi-ConvLSTM: An Ultra-Lightweight Efficient Model for Human Activity Recognition on Resource Constrained Devices
About
Human Activity Recognition (HAR) on resource constrained wearables requires models that balance accuracy against strict memory and computational budgets. State of the art lightweight architectures such as TinierHAR (34K parameters) and TinyHAR (55K parameters) achieve strong accuracy, but exceed memory budgets of microcontrollers with limited SRAM once operating system overhead is considered. We present MicroBi-ConvLSTM, an ultra-lightweight convolutional recurrent architecture achieving 11.4K parameters on average through two stage convolutional feature extraction with 4x temporal pooling, and a single bidirectional LSTM layer. This represents 2.9x parameter reduction versus TinierHAR and 11.9x versus DeepConvLSTM while preserving linear O(N) complexity. Evaluation across eight diverse HAR benchmarks shows that MicroBi-ConvLSTM maintains competitive performance within the ultra-lightweight regime: 93.41% macro F1 on UCI-HAR, 94.46% on SKODA assembly gestures, and 88.98% on Daphnet gait freeze detection. Systematic ablation reveals task dependent component contributions where bidirectionality benefits episodic event detection, but provides marginal gains on periodic locomotion. On-device deployment on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and ESP32 validates hardware viability under both INT8 quantized and FP32 full-precision paths. Under INT8 quantization, MicroBi-ConvLSTM is the only architecture achieving full 8/8 dataset coverage on both platforms, with 72.8 ms average latency on Pico 2 and 97.9% PyTorch parity on ESP32. Under FP32 deployment, it achieves 100.0% parity on all successful configurations (8/8 Pico 2, 7/8 ESP32), confirming that all INT8 fidelity degradation is a quantization artifact rather than an architectural limitation.