Abstract Activity recognition using mobile phones has great potential in many applications including mobile healthcare. In order to let a person easily know whether he is in strict compliance with the doctor’s exercise prescription and adjust his exercise amount accordingly, we can use a smart-phone based activity reporting system to accurately recognize a range of daily activities and report the duration of each activity. A triaxial accelerometer embedded in the smart phone is used for the classi?cation of several activities, such as staying still, walking, running, and going upstairs and downstairs. The model learnt from a speci?c person often cannot yield accurate results when used on a different person. To solve the cross-people activity recognition problem, we propose an algorithm known as TransEMDT (Transfer learning EMbedded Decision Tree) that integrates a decision tree and the k-means clustering algorithm for personalized activity-recognition model adaptation. Tested on a real-world data set, the results show that our algorithm outperforms several traditional baseline algorithms.