With the availability of affordable sensors and sensor networks, sensor-based human-activity recognition has attracted much attention in artificial intelligence and ubiquitous computing. In this paper, we present a novel two-phase approach for detecting abnormal activities based on wireless sensors attached to a human body. Detecting abnormal activities is a particularly important task in security monitoring and healthcare applications of sensor networks, among many others. Traditional approaches to this problem suffer from a high false positive rate, particularly, when the collected sensor data are biased toward normal data while the abnormal events are rare. Therefore, there is a lack of training data for many traditional data mining methods to be applied. To solve this problem, our approach first employs a one-class support vector machine (SVM) that is trained on commonly available normal activities, which filters out the activities that have a very high probability of being normal....