This paper addresses the challenge of recognizing daily activities in a smart home environment for elderly care using various discriminative classifiers, including a new cost-sensitive criterion for soft-support vector machines (C-SVM). It specifically tackles the class imbalance issue prevalent in activity recognition datasets, demonstrating that the proposed C-SVM method outperforms other state-of-the-art classifiers, such as conditional random fields and k-nearest neighbors, on imbalanced datasets. The study emphasizes the importance of accurate activity recognition for assessing elderly individuals' physical and cognitive capabilities to enhance home care solutions.