scholarly journals An Image-Based Fall Detection System for the Elderly

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 1995 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kun-Lin Lu ◽  
Edward Chu

Due to advances in medical technology, the elderly population has continued to grow. Elderly healthcare issues have been widely discussed—especially fall accidents—because a fall can lead to a fracture and have serious consequences. Therefore, the effective detection of fall accidents is important for both elderly people and their caregivers. In this work, we designed an Image-based FAll Detection System (IFADS) for nursing homes, where public areas are usually equipped with surveillance cameras. Unlike existing fall detection algorithms, we mainly focused on falls that occur while sitting down and standing up from a chair, because the two activities together account for a higher proportion of falls than forward walking. IFADS first applies an object detection algorithm to identify people in a video frame. Then, a posture recognition method is used to keep tracking the status of the people by checking the relative positions of the chair and the people. An alarm is triggered when a fall is detected. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of IFADS, we not only simulated different fall scenarios, but also adopted YouTube and Giphy videos that captured real falls. Our experimental results showed that IFADS achieved an average accuracy of 95.96%. Therefore, IFADS can be used by nursing homes to improve the quality of residential care facilities.

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 1889
Author(s):  
Francisco Luna-Perejón ◽  
Luis Muñoz-Saavedra ◽  
Javier Civit-Masot ◽  
Anton Civit ◽  
Manuel Domínguez-Morales

Falls are one of the leading causes of permanent injury and/or disability among the elderly. When these people live alone, it is convenient that a caregiver or family member visits them periodically. However, these visits do not prevent falls when the elderly person is alone. Furthermore, in exceptional circumstances, such as a pandemic, we must avoid unnecessary mobility. This is why remote monitoring systems are currently on the rise, and several commercial solutions can be found. However, current solutions use devices attached to the waist or wrist, causing discomfort in the people who wear them. The users also tend to forget to wear the devices carried in these positions. Therefore, in order to prevent these problems, the main objective of this work is designing and recollecting a new dataset about falls, falling risks and activities of daily living using an ankle-placed device obtaining a good balance between the different activity types. This dataset will be a useful tool for researchers who want to integrate the fall detector in the footwear. Thus, in this work we design the fall-detection device, study the suitable activities to be collected, collect the dataset from 21 users performing the studied activities and evaluate the quality of the collected dataset. As an additional and secondary study, we implement a simple Deep Learning classifier based on this data to prove the system’s feasibility.


Author(s):  
Jie Lian ◽  
Xu Yuan ◽  
Ming Li ◽  
Nian-Feng Tzeng

The fall detection system is of critical importance in protecting elders through promptly discovering fall accidents to provide immediate medical assistance, potentially saving elders' lives. This paper aims to develop a novel and lightweight fall detection system by relying solely on a home audio device via inaudible acoustic sensing, to recognize fall occurrences for wide home deployment. In particular, we program the audio device to let its speaker emit 20kHz continuous wave, while utilizing a microphone to record reflected signals for capturing the Doppler shift caused by the fall. Considering interferences from different factors, we first develop a set of solutions for their removal to get clean spectrograms and then apply the power burst curve to locate the time points at which human motions happen. A set of effective features is then extracted from the spectrograms for representing the fall patterns, distinguishable from normal activities. We further apply the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and K-mean algorithms to reduce the data feature dimensions and to cluster the data, respectively, before input them to a Hidden Markov Model for training and classification. In the end, our system is implemented and deployed in various environments for evaluation. The experimental results demonstrate that our system can achieve superior performance for detecting fall accidents and is robust to environment changes, i.e., transferable to other environments after training in one environment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Ning Liu ◽  
Dedi Zhang ◽  
Zhong Su ◽  
Tianrun Wang

The aging population has become a growing worldwide problem. Every year, deaths and injuries caused by elderly people's falls bring huge social costs. To reduce the rate of injury and death caused by falls among the elderly and the following social cost, the elderly must be monitored. In this context, falls detecting has become a hotspot for many research institutions and enterprises at home and abroad. This paper proposes an algorithm framework to prealarm the fall based on fractional domain, using inertial data sensor as motion data collection devices, preprocessing the data by axis synthesis and mean filtering, and using fractional-order Fourier transform to convert the collected data from time domain to fractional domain. Based on the above, a multilayer dichotomy classifier is designed, and each node parameter selection method is given, which constructed a preimpact fall detection system with excellent performance. The experiment result demonstrates that the algorithm proposed in this paper can guarantee better warning effect and classification accuracy with fewer features.


Author(s):  
Nishanth P

Falls have become one of the reasons for death. It is common among the elderly. According to World Health Organization (WHO), 3 out of 10 living alone elderly people of age 65 and more tend to fall. This rate may get higher in the upcoming years. In recent years, the safety of elderly residents alone has received increased attention in a number of countries. The fall detection system based on the wearable sensors has made its debut in response to the early indicator of detecting the fall and the usage of the IoT technology, but it has some drawbacks, including high infiltration, low accuracy, poor reliability. This work describes a fall detection that does not reliant on wearable sensors and is related on machine learning and image analysing in Python. The camera's high-frequency pictures are sent to the network, which uses the Convolutional Neural Network technique to identify the main points of the human. The Support Vector Machine technique uses the data output from the feature extraction to classify the fall. Relatives will be notified via mobile message. Rather than modelling individual activities, we use both motion and context information to recognize activities in a scene. This is based on the notion that actions that are spatially and temporally connected rarely occur alone and might serve as background for one another. We propose a hierarchical representation of action segments and activities using a two-layer random field model. The model allows for the simultaneous integration of motion and a variety of context features at multiple levels, as well as the automatic learning of statistics that represent the patterns of the features.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2136 (1) ◽  
pp. 012053
Author(s):  
Zeyu Chen

Abstract With the rapid increase in the number of people living in the elderly population, reducing and dealing with the problem of falls in the elderly has become the focus of research for decades. It is impossible to completely eliminate falls in daily life and activities. Detecting a fall in time can protect the elderly from injury as much as possible. This article uses the Turtlebot robot and the ROS robot operating system, combined with simultaneous positioning and map construction technology, Monte Carlo positioning, A* path planning, dynamic window method, and indoor map navigation. The YOLO network is trained using the stance and fall data sets, and the YOLOv4 target detection algorithm is combined with the robot perception algorithm to finally achieve fall detection on the turtlebot robot, and use the average precision, precision, recall and other indicators to measure.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moiz Ahmed ◽  
Nadeem Mehmood ◽  
Adnan Nadeem ◽  
Amir Mehmood ◽  
Kashif Rizwan

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