i-Mask: An Intelligent Mask for Breath-Driven Activity Recognition

Human activity recognition (HAR) has gained significant attention due to its applications in health monitoring, intelligent environments, and human-computer interaction Hussain, Khan, Khan, Bhatt, Farouk, Bhola, and Baik (2024); Mishra, Gupta, Gupta, and Dutta (2022). Traditional HAR approaches employed wearable inertial sensors, vision-based methods, and environmental sensors for HAR. However, each method has inherent limitations such as discomfort, privacy concerns, or complex deployment requirements Wang, Huang, Zhao, Zhu, Huang, and Wu (2024); Mishra and Gupta (2025). The human body engages with its environment in diverse ways, one of which is the interaction between the lungs and the external environment through the act of breathing via the nose. The breathing pattern encompasses plenty of useful information that can be processed to fetch different behaviours and health information Mongelli, Orani, Cambiaso, Vaccari, Paglialonga, Braido, and Catalano (2020); Zhang, Wang, and Li (2024). Moreover, the breathing patterns are influenced by metabolic and physiological factors, offering a non-invasive and unobtrusive means of HAR.