Smart environment is an efficient and cost-effective way to afford intelligent supports for the elderly people. Human activity recognition is a crucial aspect of the research field of smart environments, and it has attracted widespread attention lately. The goal of this study is to develop an effective sensor-based human activity recognition model based on the belief-rule-based system (BRBS), which is one of representative rule-based expert systems. Specially, a new belief rule base (BRB) modeling approach is proposed by taking into account the self- organizing rule generation method and the multi-temporal rule representation scheme, in order to address the problem of combination explosion that existed in the traditional BRB modelling procedure and the time correlation found in continuous sensor data in chronological order. The new BRB modeling approach is so called self-organizing and multi-temporal BRB (SOMT-BRB) modeling procedure. A case study is further deducted to validate the effectiveness of the SOMT-BRB modeling procedure. By comparing with some conventional BRBSs and classical activity recognition models, the results show a significant improvement of the BRBS in terms of the number of belief rules, modelling efficiency, and activity recognition accuracy.