scholarly journals Re-Enactment as a Method to Reproduce Real-World Fall Events Using Inertial Sensor Data: Development and Usability Study

10.2196/13961 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. e13961
Author(s):  
Kim Sarah Sczuka ◽  
Lars Schwickert ◽  
Clemens Becker ◽  
Jochen Klenk

Background Falls are a common health problem, which in the worst cases can lead to death. To develop reliable fall detection algorithms as well as suitable prevention interventions, it is important to understand circumstances and characteristics of real-world fall events. Although falls are common, they are seldom observed, and reports are often biased. Wearable inertial sensors provide an objective approach to capture real-world fall signals. However, it is difficult to directly derive visualization and interpretation of body movements from the fall signals, and corresponding video data is rarely available. Objective The re-enactment method uses available information from inertial sensors to simulate fall events, replicate the data, validate the simulation, and thereby enable a more precise description of the fall event. The aim of this paper is to describe this method and demonstrate the validity of the re-enactment approach. Methods Real-world fall data, measured by inertial sensors attached to the lower back, were selected from the Fall Repository for the Design of Smart and Self-Adaptive Environments Prolonging Independent Living (FARSEEING) database. We focused on well-described fall events such as stumbling to be re-enacted under safe conditions in a laboratory setting. For the purposes of exemplification, we selected the acceleration signal of one fall event to establish a detailed simulation protocol based on identified postures and trunk movement sequences. The subsequent re-enactment experiments were recorded with comparable inertial sensor configurations as well as synchronized video cameras to analyze the movement behavior in detail. The re-enacted sensor signals were then compared with the real-world signals to adapt the protocol and repeat the re-enactment method if necessary. The similarity between the simulated and the real-world fall signals was analyzed with a dynamic time warping algorithm, which enables the comparison of two temporal sequences varying in speed and timing. Results A fall example from the FARSEEING database was used to show the feasibility of producing a similar sensor signal with the re-enactment method. Although fall events were heterogeneous concerning chronological sequence and curve progression, it was possible to reproduce a good approximation of the motion of a person’s center of mass during fall events based on the available sensor information. Conclusions Re-enactment is a promising method to understand and visualize the biomechanics of inertial sensor-recorded real-world falls when performed in a suitable setup, especially if video data is not available.

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Bajones ◽  
David Fischinger ◽  
Astrid Weiss ◽  
Daniel Wolf ◽  
Markus Vincze ◽  
...  

We present the robot developed within the Hobbit project, a socially assistive service robot aiming at the challenge of enabling prolonged independent living of elderly people in their own homes. We present the second prototype (Hobbit PT2) in terms of hardware and functionality improvements following first user studies. Our main contribution lies within the description of all components developed within the Hobbit project, leading to autonomous operation of 371 days during field trials in Austria, Greece, and Sweden. In these field trials, we studied how 18 elderly users (aged 75 years and older) lived with the autonomously interacting service robot over multiple weeks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a multifunctional, low-cost service robot equipped with a manipulator was studied and evaluated for several weeks under real-world conditions. We show that Hobbit’s adaptive approach towards the user increasingly eased the interaction between the users and Hobbit. We provide lessons learned regarding the need for adaptive behavior coordination, support during emergency situations, and clear communication of robotic actions and their consequences for fellow researchers who are developing an autonomous, low-cost service robot designed to interact with their users in domestic contexts. Our trials show the necessity to move out into actual user homes, as only there can we encounter issues such as misinterpretation of actions during unscripted human-robot interaction.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (22) ◽  
pp. 6479
Author(s):  
Luca Palmerini ◽  
Jochen Klenk ◽  
Clemens Becker ◽  
Lorenzo Chiari

Falling is a significant health problem. Fall detection, to alert for medical attention, has been gaining increasing attention. Still, most of the existing studies use falls simulated in a laboratory environment to test the obtained performance. We analyzed the acceleration signals recorded by an inertial sensor on the lower back during 143 real-world falls (the most extensive collection to date) from the FARSEEING repository. Such data were obtained from continuous real-world monitoring of subjects with a moderate-to-high risk of falling. We designed and tested fall detection algorithms using features inspired by a multiphase fall model and a machine learning approach. The obtained results suggest that algorithms can learn effectively from features extracted from a multiphase fall model, consistently overperforming more conventional features. The most promising method (support vector machines and features from the multiphase fall model) obtained a sensitivity higher than 80%, a false alarm rate per hour of 0.56, and an F-measure of 64.6%. The reported results and methodologies represent an advancement of knowledge on real-world fall detection and suggest useful metrics for characterizing fall detection systems for real-world use.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 373-387
Author(s):  
Liyun Gong ◽  
Lu Zhang ◽  
Ming Zhu ◽  
Miao Yu ◽  
Ross Clifford ◽  
...  

In this paper, we propose a novel person specific fall detection system based on a monocular camera, which can be applied for assisting the independent living of an older adult living alone at home. A single camera covering the living area is used for video recordings of an elderly person’s normal daily activities. From the recorded video data, the human silhouette regions in every frame are then extracted based on the codebook background subtraction technique. Low-dimensionality representative features of extracted silhouetted are then extracted by convolutional neural network-based autoencoder (CNN-AE). Features obtained from the CNN-AE are applied to construct an one class support vector machine (OCSVM) model, which is a data driven model based on the video recordings and can be applied for fall detection. From the comprehensive experimental evaluations on different people in a real home environment, it is shown that the proposed fall detection system can successfully detect different types of falls (falls towards different orientations at different positions in a real home environment) with small false alarms.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (19) ◽  
pp. 6559
Author(s):  
Nils Roth ◽  
Arne Küderle ◽  
Dominik Prossel ◽  
Heiko Gassner ◽  
Bjoern M. Eskofier ◽  
...  

Climbing stairs is a fundamental part of daily life, adding additional demands on the postural control system compared to level walking. Although real-world gait analysis studies likely contain stair ambulation sequences, algorithms dedicated to the analysis of such activities are still missing. Therefore, we propose a new gait analysis pipeline for foot-worn inertial sensors, which can segment, parametrize, and classify strides from continuous gait sequences that include level walking, stair ascending, and stair descending. For segmentation, an existing approach based on the hidden Markov model and a feature-based gait event detection were extended, reaching an average segmentation F1 score of 98.5% and gait event timing errors below ±10ms for all conditions. Stride types were classified with an accuracy of 98.2% using spatial features derived from a Kalman filter-based trajectory reconstruction. The evaluation was performed on a dataset of 20 healthy participants walking on three different staircases at different speeds. The entire pipeline was additionally validated end-to-end on an independent dataset of 13 Parkinson’s disease patients. The presented work aims to extend real-world gait analysis by including stair ambulation parameters in order to gain new insights into mobility impairments that can be linked to clinically relevant conditions such as a patient’s fall risk and disease state or progression.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (19) ◽  
pp. 4119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Diete ◽  
Heiner Stuckenschmidt

In the field of pervasive computing, wearable devices have been widely used for recognizing human activities. One important area in this research is the recognition of activities of daily living where especially inertial sensors and interaction sensors (like RFID tags with scanners) are popular choices as data sources. Using interaction sensors, however, has one drawback: they may not differentiate between proper interaction and simple touching of an object. A positive signal from an interaction sensor is not necessarily caused by a performed activity e.g., when an object is only touched but no interaction occurred afterwards. There are, however, many scenarios like medicine intake that rely heavily on correctly recognized activities. In our work, we aim to address this limitation and present a multimodal egocentric-based activity recognition approach. Our solution relies on object detection that recognizes activity-critical objects in a frame. As it is infeasible to always expect a high quality camera view, we enrich the vision features with inertial sensor data that monitors the users’ arm movement. This way we try to overcome the drawbacks of each respective sensor. We present our results of combining inertial and video features to recognize human activities on different types of scenarios where we achieve an F 1 -measure of up to 79.6%.


Author(s):  
Edgar Charry ◽  
Daniel T.H. Lai

The use of inertial sensors to measure human movement has recently gained momentum with the advent of low cost micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology. These sensors comprise accelerometer and gyroscopes which measure accelerations and angular velocities respectively. Secondary quantities such as displacement can be obtained by integration of these quantities, a method which presents challenging issues due to the problem of accumulative sensor errors. This chapter investigates the spectral evaluation of individual sensor errors and looks at the effectiveness of minimizing these errors using static digital filters. The primary focus is on the derivation of foot displacement data from inertial sensor measurements. The importance of foot, in particular toe displacement measurements is evident in the context of tripping and falling which are serious health concerns for the elderly. The Minimum Toe Clearance (MTC) as an important gait variable for falls-risk prediction and assessment, and therefore the measurement variable of interest. A brief sketch of the current devices employing accelerometers and gyroscopes is presented, highlighting the problems and difficulties reported in literature to achieve good precision. These have been mainly due to the presence of sensor errors and the error accumulative process employed in obtaining displacement measurements. The investigation first proceeds to identify the location of these sensor errors in the frequency domain using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) on raw inertial sensor data. The frequency content of velocity and displacement measurements obtained from integrating the inertial data using a well known strap-down method is then explored. These investigations revealed that large sensor errors occurred mainly in the low frequency spectrum while white noise exists in all frequency spectra. The efficacy of employing a band-pass filter to remove a large portion of these errors and their effect on the derived displacements is elaborated on. The cross-correlation of the FFT power spectra from a highly accurate optical measurement system and processed sensor data is used as a metric to evaluate the performance of the band-pass filter at several stages of the processing stage. The motivation is that a more fundamental method would require less computational demand and could lead to more efficient implementations in low-power and systems with limited resources, so that portable sensor based motion measurement system would provide a good degree of measurement accuracy.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timo von Marcard

This thesis explores approaches to capture human motions with a small number of sensors. In the first part of this thesis an approach is presented that reconstructs the body pose from only six inertial sensors. Instead of relying on pre-recorded motion databases, a global optimization problem is solved to maximize the consistency of measurements and model over an entire recording sequence. The second part of this thesis deals with a hybrid approach to fuse visual information from a single hand-held camera with inertial sensor data. First, a discrete optimization problem is solved to automatically associate people detections in the video with inertial sensor data. Then, a global optimization problem is formulated to combine visual and inertial information. The propose  approach enables capturing of multiple interacting people and works even if many more people are visible in the camera image. In addition, systematic inertial sensor errors can be compensated, leading to a substantial in...


Algorithms ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Ryan Feng ◽  
Yu Yao ◽  
Ella Atkins

Autonomous vehicles require fleet-wide data collection for continuous algorithm development and validation. The smart black box (SBB) intelligent event data recorder has been proposed as a system for prioritized high-bandwidth data capture. This paper extends the SBB by applying anomaly detection and action detection methods for generalized event-of-interest (EOI) detection. An updated SBB pipeline is proposed for the real-time capture of driving video data. A video dataset is constructed to evaluate the SBB on real-world data for the first time. SBB performance is assessed by comparing the compression of normal and anomalous data and by comparing our prioritized data recording with an FIFO strategy. The results show that SBB data compression can increase the anomalous-to-normal memory ratio by ∼25%, while the prioritized recording strategy increases the anomalous-to-normal count ratio when compared to an FIFO strategy. We compare the real-world dataset SBB results to a baseline SBB given ground-truth anomaly labels and conclude that improved general EOI detection methods will greatly improve SBB performance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (04) ◽  
pp. 1940006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga C. Santos

Recent trends in educational technology focus on designing systems that can support students while learning complex psychomotor skills, such as those required when practicing sports and martial arts, dancing or playing a musical instrument. In this context, artificial intelligence can be key to personalize the development of these psychomotor skills by enabling the provision of effective feedback when the instructor is not present, or scaling up to a larger pool of students the feedback that an instructor would typically provide one-on-one. This paper presents the modeling of human motion gathered with inertial sensors aimed to offer a personalized support to students when learning complex psychomotor skills. In particular, when comparing learner data with those of an expert during the psychomotor learning process, artificial intelligence algorithms can allow to: (i) recognize specific motion learning units and (ii) assess learning performance in a motion unit. However, it seems that this field is still emerging, since when reviewed systematically, search results hardly included the motion modeling with artificial intelligence techniques of complex human activities measured with inertial sensors.


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