P2MFDS: A Privacy-Preserving Multimodal Fall Detection System for Elderly People in Bathroom Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces P2MFDS, a multimodal fall detection system combining radar and vibration sensors, designed to improve accuracy and privacy in bathroom environments for elderly fall detection.

Contribution

It develops a sensor fusion framework, constructs a large-scale multimodal dataset, and proposes a dual-stream neural network that enhances fall detection accuracy in privacy-sensitive settings.

Findings

Significant accuracy and recall improvements over existing methods.

Effective fusion of radar and vibration data enhances detection robustness.

Public release of dataset and models to facilitate further research.

Abstract

By 2050, people aged 65 and over are projected to make up 16 percent of the global population. As aging is closely associated with increased fall risk, particularly in wet and confined environments such as bathrooms where over 80 percent of falls occur. Although recent research has increasingly focused on non-intrusive, privacy-preserving approaches that do not rely on wearable devices or video-based monitoring, these efforts have not fully overcome the limitations of existing unimodal systems (e.g., WiFi-, infrared-, or mmWave-based), which are prone to reduced accuracy in complex environments. These limitations stem from fundamental constraints in unimodal sensing, including system bias and environmental interference, such as multipath fading in WiFi-based systems and drastic temperature changes in infrared-based methods. To address these challenges, we propose a Privacy-Preserving Multimodal Fall Detection System for Elderly People in Bathroom Environments. First, we develop a sensor evaluation framework to select and fuse millimeter-wave radar with 3D vibration sensing, and use it to construct and preprocess a large-scale, privacy-preserving multimodal dataset in real bathroom settings, which will be released upon publication. Second, we introduce P2MFDS, a dual-stream network combining a CNN-BiLSTM-Attention branch for radar motion dynamics with a multi-scale CNN-SEBlock-Self-Attention branch for vibration impact detection. By uniting macro- and micro-scale features, P2MFDS delivers significant gains in accuracy and recall over state-of-the-art approaches. Code and pretrained models will be made available at: https://github.com/HaitianWang/P2MFDS-A-Privacy-Preserving-Multimodal-Fall-Detection-Network-for-Elderly-Individuals-in-Bathroom.