Activity Recognition

pub package

Activity recognition plugin for Android and iOS. Only working while App is running (= not terminated by the user or OS).

The communication with the native platforms is defined in pigeons/messages.dart and generated with Pigeon. Regenerate it after changing that file with:

dart run pigeon --input pigeons/messages.dart

The iOS implementation is a Swift package (ios/activity_recognition_flutter/). CocoaPods is no longer supported, so consuming apps must use Swift Package Manager. See iOS below.

Configuration

Android

The permissions the plugin requires, and the broadcast receiver and foreground service it relies on, are declared by the plugin.

You still have to request the ACTIVITY_RECOGNITION runtime permission before listening to the stream -- see Usage below.

Known Android quirks

If you update from Android SDK <=28 to >=29 remember to run flutter clean. See e.g. this post on stack overflow.

This package uses the Android Embedding API v2. In order to use this in pre-Flutter 1.12 projects, you need to follow this guide.

iOS

This plugin ships only as a Swift package, so your app must use Swift Package Manager. It is enabled by default on Flutter 3.44 and later; if you turned it off, re-enable it with:

flutter config --enable-swift-package-manager

If your app still has CocoaPods integration, see Flutter Swift Package Manager guide for details.

An iOS app linked on must include usage description keys in its Info.plist file for the types of data it needs. Failure to include these keys will cause the app to crash. To access motion and fitness data specifically, it must include NSMotionUsageDescription, like this:

<key>NSMotionUsageDescription</key>
<string>Detects human activity</string>

Usage

To use this plugin, you need to also use the permission_handler plugin, or some other way of requesting permission. See the example app.

NOTE: You should NOT use the permission handler plugin for requesting activity recognition on iOS, since it is not needed and will make your iOS app crash.

Data types

Each detected activity will have an activity type, which is one of the following:

  • IN_VEHICLE
  • ON_BICYCLE
  • ON_FOOT
  • RUNNING
  • STILL
  • TILTING
  • UNKNOWN
  • WALKING

As well as a confidence expressed in percentages (i.e. a value from 0-100), and the timestamp of the detection as reported by the platform.

Libraries

activity_recognition_flutter