The Acoustic Emission (AE) phenomenon has been used as a powerful tool with the purpose to either detect, locate or assess damage for a wide range of applications. Derived from its monitoring, one major current challenge on the analysis of the acquired signal is the proper identification and separation of each AE event. Current advanced methods for detecting events are primarily focused on identifying with high accuracy the beginning of the AE wave; however, the detection of the conclusion has been disregarded in the literature. For an automatic continuous detection of events within a data stream, this lack of accuracy for the conclusion of the events generates errors in two critical aspects. In one hand, it deteriorates the accuracy of the measurement of the events duration, truncating the span of the event (undesirable in evaluation applications), and in the other hand, it causes false detections. In this work, an accurate and computationally efficient AE activity detector is presented, using a framework inspired by the area of speech processing, and which provides the required indicators to accurately detect the onset and the end of an AE event. This is achieved by means of a threshold approach that instead of directly operates with the transduced voltage signal it does so over the Short-Term Energy and the Short-Term Zero-Crossing Rate measures of the signal. The STE-ZCR method is developed for an application related to the continuous monitoring of a single AE channel derived from the characterization of metallic components by means of a uniaxial tensile test. Additionally, two experimental test-benches are implemented with the aim to quantify the accuracy and the quality of event detection of the presented method. Finally, the obtained results are compared with four different techniques, representing the current state of the art related to AE activity detection.