Radar-Based Elderly Fall Detection Using Smoothed Pseudo Wigner Ville Distribution and XGBoost Learning.

Abstract

Falls among the elderly population pose significant health risks, often leading to morbidity and decreased quality of life. Traditional fall detection methods, namely wearable devices and cameras, have limitations such as lighting conditions and privacy concerns. Radar-based fall detection has emerged as a promising alternative, offering unobtrusive technique. In this study, an attempt has been made to classify fall detection using smoothed pseudo wigner-ville distribution (SPWVD) images and XGBoost learning. For this, online publicly available radar database (N=15) is considered. Radar signals is employed to SPWVD for time-frequency representation images. Ten features are extracted and applied to XGBoost learning. Experiments are performed and performance is evaluated using 10-fold cross validation. The proposed approach is able to discriminate elderly fall. Using XGBoost learning, the approach yields a maximum average classification accuracy, f1-score, precision, sensitivity, specificity, and kappa scores of 87.47%, 87.38%, 88.12%, 86.81%, 88.31% and 74.94% respectively. The combination of conventional features with concentration measures and median frequency obtained the second best performance. Thus, the proposed framework could be utilized for accurate and efficient detection of falls among the elderly population in their private spaces.