For the past few years, smartphone based human activity recognition (HAR) has gained much popularity due to its embedded sensors which have found various applications in healthcare, surveillance, human-device interaction, pattern recognition etc. In this paper, we propose a neural network model to classify human activities, which uses activity-driven hand-crafted features. First, the neighborhood component analysis derived feature selection is used to choose a subset of important features from the available time and frequency domain parameters. Next, a dense neural network consisting of four hidden layers is modeled to classify the input features into different categories. The model is evaluated on publicly available UCI HAR data set consisting of six daily activities; our approach achieved 95.79% classification accuracy. When compared with existing state-of-the-art methods, our proposed model outperformed most other methods while using fewer features, thus showing the importance of proper feature selection.