CMFALL: A Cascade and Parallel Multi-State Fall Detection Algorithm Using Waist-Mounted Tri-Axial Accelerometer Signals

Abstract

As one of the main threats to people's health, especially for the elderly, falls have caused a large number of accidents. Detecting falls in time can minimize the severity of the injury and save lives. Therefore, designing fall detection algorithms to assist people's daily life has been a hot research topic. In the last decade, different fall detection approaches based on wearable sensors have been proposed. However, since the hardware resources of wearable sensors are very limited, designing accurate but energy-efficient fall detection algorithms remains an open challenge. To deal with this, an accurate but low-cost fall detection algorithm is proposed in this paper. Particularly, a novel cascade and parallel method that efficiently employs the characteristics of human falls and the advanced modeling ability of the neural network is proposed. Also, a novel design of a lightweight convolutional neural network with self-attention is proposed to achieve the best recognition/numerical complexity tradeoff. The proposed method, namely CMFALL, is evaluated together with a multitude of state-of-the-art models on a large dataset, where it performs the best with an F1-score exceeding 99%. Meanwhile, its computational cost and model size are only a few thousandths of other models. Such low computational cost and small size not only enable to embed it in a wearable sensor but also make the system power requirements quite low, which can enhance the autonomy of the wearable fall detector.