A Novel Two-Step Fall Detection Method Using Smartphone Sensors

Abstract

A smartphone-based fall detection system has two major advantages over a traditional fall detection system that comes as a separate device: (1) the phone can automatically send messages to or call the emergency contact person when a fall is detected and (2) a user does not need to carry an extra device. This paper presents a novel two-step fall detection method which uses data extracted from smartphone sensors to detect falls. A fall can happen in many ways. A person can fall while he/she is walking, jogging, sitting, or even sleeping. Patterns of all falls are not the same. It is important to identify the type of falls to precisely distinguish it from non-falls (normal activities). Hence, our method first identifies the correct type of falls by performing multi-class classification. In the second step, this method produces a binary decision based on the multiclass prediction. We collected data from 10 users to evaluate our proposed fall detection method. Each user performed five normal activities–namely, walking, jogging, standing, sitting, lying, and also fell after performing each activity. We performed experiments with five common smartphone sensors: accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, gravity, and linear acceleration. We tested five machine learning classifiers–namely, Support Vector Machine, K-Nearest Neighbor, Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Naive Bayes. Our two-step fall detection method achieved the maximum accuracy of 95.65% and the maximum area under ROC curve (AUC) of 0.93, both with the gyroscope sensor and Support Vector Machine classifier.