A fall alert system with prior-fall activity identification

TL;DR

This paper presents a fall alert system that identifies prior-fall activities using multi-spot on-body sensors and machine learning, achieving high accuracy in detecting falls and related activities, with potential applications in elderly care.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel fall alert system that detects prior-fall activities and optimizes sensor placement, improving fall detection accuracy over existing methods.

Findings

Fall detection accuracy of 88.91%

Prior-fall activity detection accuracy of 86.25%

Effective use of XGBoost and chest sensor placement

Abstract

Falling, especially in the elderly, is a critical issue to care for and surveil. There have been many studies focusing on fall detection. However, from our survey, there is still no research indicating the prior-fall activities, which we believe that they have a strong correlation with the intensity of the fall. The purpose of this research is to develop a fall alert system that also identifies prior-fall activities. First, we want to find a suitable location to attach a sensor to the body. We created multiple-spot on-body devices to collect various activity data. We used that dataset to train 5 different classification models. We selected the XGBoost classification model for detecting a prior-fall activity and the chest location for use in fall detection from a comparison of the detection accuracy. We then tested 3 existing fall detection threshold algorithms to detect fall and fall to their knees first, and selected the 3-phase threshold algorithm of Chaitep and Chawachat [3] in our system. From the experiment, we found that the fall detection accuracy is 88.91%, the fall to their knees first detection accuracy is 91.25%, and the average accuracy of detection of prior-fall activities is 86.25%. Although we use an activity dataset of young to middle-aged adults (18-49 years), we are confident that this system can be developed to monitor activities before the fall, especially in the elderly, so that caretakers can better manage the situation.