Analysis of Contextual Sensors for Fall Detection

Abstract

Falls are a major problem among older people and often cause serious injuries. It is important to have efficient fall detection solutions to reduce the time in which a person who suffered a fall receives assistance. Given the recent availability of cameras, wearable and ambient sensors, more research in fall detection is focused on combining different data modalities. In order to determine the positive effects of each modality and combination to improve the effectiveness of fall detection, a detailed assessment has to be done. In this paper, we analyzed different combinations of wearable devices, namely IMUs and EEG helmet, with grid of active infrared sensors for fall detection, with the aim to determine the positive effects of contextual information on the accuracy in fall detection. We used short-term memory (LSTM) networks to enable fall detection from sensors raw data. For some activities certain combinations can be helpful to discriminate other activities of daily living (ADL) from falls.