scholarly journals Assessing the Feasibility of Augmenting Fall Detection Systems by Relying on UWB-Based Position Tracking and a Home Robot

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (18) ◽  
pp. 5361
Author(s):  
Maurizio Capra ◽  
Stefano Sapienza ◽  
Paolo Motto Ros ◽  
Alessio Serrani ◽  
Maurizio Martina ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Emergency Response ◽  
Detection System ◽  
Tracking System ◽  
Fall Detection ◽  
Detection Algorithm ◽  
Line Of Sight ◽  
False Alarms ◽  
Notification System ◽  
Detection Systems ◽  
Home Robot

Falls in the home environment are a primary cause of injury in older adults. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, every year, one in four adults 65 years of age and older reports experiencing a fall. A variety of different technologies have been proposed to detect fall events. However, the need to detect all fall instances (i.e., to avoid false negatives) has led to the development of systems marked by high sensitivity and hence a significant number of false alarms. The occurrence of false alarms causes frequent and unnecessary calls to emergency response centers, which are critical resources that should be utilized only when necessary. Besides, false alarms decrease the level of confidence of end-users in the fall detection system with a negative impact on their compliance with using the system (e.g., wearing the sensor enabling the detection of fall events). Herein, we present a novel approach aimed to augment traditional fall detection systems that rely on wearable sensors and fall detection algorithms. The proposed approach utilizes a UWB-based tracking system and a home robot. When the fall detection system generates an alarm, the alarm is relayed to a base station that utilizes a UWB-based tracking system to identify where the older adult and the robot are so as to enable navigating the environment using the robot and reaching the older adult to check if he/she experienced a fall. This approach prevents unnecessary calls to emergency response centers while enabling a tele-presence using the robot when appropriate. In this paper, we report the results of a novel fall detection algorithm, the characteristics of the alarm notification system, and the accuracy of the UWB-based tracking system that we implemented. The fall detection algorithm displayed a sensitivity of 99.0% and a specificity of 97.8%. The alarm notification system relayed all simulated alarm notification instances with a maximum delay of 106 ms. The UWB-based tracking system was found to be suitable to locate radio tags both in line-of-sight and in no-line-of-sight conditions. This result was obtained by using a machine learning-based algorithm that we developed to detect and compensate for the multipath effect in no-line-of-sight conditions. When using this algorithm, the error affecting the estimated position of the radio tags was smaller than 0.2 m, which is satisfactory for the application at hand.

scholarly journals Three Ways to Improve the Performance of Real-Life Camera-Based Fall Detection Systems

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glen Debard ◽  
Marc Mertens ◽  
Toon Goedemé ◽  
Tinne Tuytelaars ◽  
Bart Vanrumste
Keyword(s):  
False Alarm ◽  
Detection System ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Fall Detection ◽  
Training Data ◽  
False Alarms ◽  
Detection Systems ◽  
Number Of False Alarms ◽  
Real Life Data ◽  
Precision Recall Curve

More than thirty percent of persons over 65 years fall at least once a year and are often not able to get up again. Camera-based fall detection systems can help by triggering an alarm when falls occur. Previously we showed that real-life data poses significant challenges, resulting in high false alarm rates. Here, we show three ways to tackle this. First, using a particle filter combined with a person detector increases the robustness of our foreground segmentation, reducing the number of false alarms by 50%. Second, selecting only nonoccluded falls for training further decreases the false alarm rate on average from 31.4 to 26 falls per day. But, most importantly, this improvement is also shown by the doubling of the AUC of the precision-recall curve compared to using all falls. Third, personalizing the detector by adding several days containing only normal activities, no fall incidents, of the monitored person to the training data further increases the robustness of our fall detection system. In one case, this reduced the number of false alarms by a factor of 7 while in another one the sensitivity increased by 17% for an increase of the false alarms of 11%.

scholarly journals A Feasibility Study of the Use of Smartwatches in Wearable Fall Detection Systems

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 2254
Author(s):  
Francisco Javier González-Cañete ◽  
Eduardo Casilari
Keyword(s):  
Low Cost ◽  
Fall Detection ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
False Alarms ◽  
Battery Life ◽  
Area Network ◽  
Battery Lifetime ◽  
Detection Systems ◽  
Operational Aspects

Over the last few years, the use of smartwatches in automatic Fall Detection Systems (FDSs) has aroused great interest in the research of new wearable telemonitoring systems for the elderly. In contrast with other approaches to the problem of fall detection, smartwatch-based FDSs can benefit from the widespread acceptance, ergonomics, low cost, networking interfaces, and sensors that these devices provide. However, the scientific literature has shown that, due to the freedom of movement of the arms, the wrist is usually not the most appropriate position to unambiguously characterize the dynamics of the human body during falls, as many conventional activities of daily living that involve a vigorous motion of the hands may be easily misinterpreted as falls. As also stated by the literature, sensor-fusion and multi-point measurements are required to define a robust and reliable method for a wearable FDS. Thus, to avoid false alarms, it may be necessary to combine the analysis of the signals captured by the smartwatch with those collected by some other low-power sensor placed at a point closer to the body’s center of gravity (e.g., on the waist). Under this architecture of Body Area Network (BAN), these external sensing nodes must be wirelessly connected to the smartwatch to transmit their measurements. Nonetheless, the deployment of this networking solution, in which the smartwatch is in charge of processing the sensed data and generating the alarm in case of detecting a fall, may severely impact on the performance of the wearable. Unlike many other works (which often neglect the operational aspects of real fall detectors), this paper analyzes the actual feasibility of putting into effect a BAN intended for fall detection on present commercial smartwatches. In particular, the study is focused on evaluating the reduction of the battery life may cause in the watch that works as the core of the BAN. To this end, we thoroughly assess the energy drain in a prototype of an FDS consisting of a smartwatch and several external Bluetooth-enabled sensing units. In order to identify those scenarios in which the use of the smartwatch could be viable from a practical point of view, the testbed is studied with diverse commercial devices and under different configurations of those elements that may significantly hamper the battery lifetime.

Towards a Real-Time Fall Detection System using Kinect Sensor

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia Baha ◽  
Eden Beloudah ◽  
Mehdi Ousmer
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Detection System ◽  
Fall Detection ◽  
Microsoft Kinect ◽  
False Alarms ◽  
Depth Information ◽  
Detection Rates ◽  
Major Health Problem ◽  
Major Health ◽  
Time Fall

Falls are the major health problem among older people who live alone in their home. In the past few years, several studies have been proposed to solve the dilemma especially those which exploit video surveillance. In this paper, in order to allow older adult to safely continue living in home environments, the authors propose a method which combines two different configurations of the Microsoft Kinect: The first one is based on the person's depth information and his velocity (Ceiling mounted Kinect). The second one is based on the variation of bounding box parameters and its velocity (Frontal Kinect). Experimental results on real datasets are conducted and a comparative evaluation of the obtained results relative to the state-of-art methods is presented. The results show that the authors' method is able to accurately detect several types of falls in real-time as well as achieving a significant reduction in false alarms and improves detection rates.

scholarly journals Recognition of false alarms in fall detection systems

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Abbate ◽  
Marco Avvenuti ◽  
Guglielmo Cola ◽  
Paolo Corsini ◽  
Janet Light ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Fall Detection ◽  
False Alarms ◽  
Detection Systems

Three-States-Transition Method for Fall Detection Algorithm Using Depth Image

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiangbo Kong ◽  
◽  
Zelin Meng ◽  
Lin Meng ◽  
Hiroyuki Tomiyama
Keyword(s):  
Tangent Vector ◽  
Fall Detection ◽  
Detection Algorithm ◽  
Binary Image ◽  
Depth Image ◽  
Living Room ◽  
Elderly Persons ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Detection Systems ◽  
Transition Speed

Currently, the proportion of elderly persons is increasing all over the world, and accidents involving falls have become a serious problem especially for those who live alone. In this paper, an enhancement to our algorithm to detect such falls in an elderly person’s living room is proposed. Our previous algorithm obtains a binary image by using a depth camera and obtains an outline of the binary image by Canny edge detection. This algorithm then calculates the tangent vector angles of each outline pixels and divide them into 15° range groups. If most of the tangent angles are below 45°, a fall is detected. Traditional fall detection systems cannot detect falls towards the camera so at least two cameras are necessary in related works. To detect falls towards the camera, this study proposes the addition of a three-states-transition method to distinguish a fall state from a sitting-down one. The proposed algorithm computes the different position states and divides these states into three groups to detect the person’s current state. Futhermore, transition speed is calculated in order to differentiate sit states from fall states. This study constructes a data set that includes over 1500 images, and the experimental evaluation of the images demonstrates that our enhanced algorithm is effective for detecting the falls with only a single camera.

scholarly journals A novel computer vision-based data driven modelling approach for person specific fall detection

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 373-387
Author(s):  
Liyun Gong ◽  
Lu Zhang ◽  
Ming Zhu ◽  
Miao Yu ◽  
Ross Clifford ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Home Environment ◽  
Independent Living ◽  
Detection System ◽  
Fall Detection ◽  
Video Data ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
False Alarms ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
Low Dimensionality

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.

scholarly journals Fall detection system based on BiLSTM neural network

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 01-12
Author(s):  
Biao YE ◽  
Lasheng Yu
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Detection System ◽  
Input Sequence ◽  
Fall Detection ◽  
Detection Algorithm ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Sensor Data ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Sequence Modeling

The purpose of this article is to analyze the characteristics of human fall behavior to design a fall detection system. The existing fall detection algorithms have problems such as poor adaptability, single function and difficulty in processing large data and strong randomness. Therefore, a long-term and short-term memory recurrent neural network is used to improve the effect of falling behavior detection by exploring the internal correlation between sensor data. Firstly, the serialization representation method of sensor data, training data and detection input data is designed. The BiLSTM network has the characteristics of strong ability to sequence modeling and it is used to reduce the dimension of the data required by the fall detection model. then, the BiLSTM training algorithm for fall detection and the BiLSTM-based fall detection algorithm convert the fall detection into the classification problem of the input sequence; finally, the BiLSTM-based fall detection system was implemented on the TensorFlow platform. The detection and analysis of system were carried out using a bionic experiment data set which mimics a fall. The experimental results verify that the system can effectively improve the accuracy of fall detection to 90.47%. At the same time, it can effectively detect the behavior of Near-falling, and help to take corresponding protective measures.

Reducing False Alarms in Vision-Based Fire Detection

2017 ◽  
pp. 263-290
Author(s):  
Neethidevan Veerapathiran ◽  
Anand S.
Keyword(s):  
Video Processing ◽  
Detection System ◽  
Chemical Properties ◽  
Fire Detection ◽  
False Alarms ◽  
Video Signals ◽  
Detection Systems ◽  
Physical Sensors ◽  
Single Feature ◽  
Fire Detection System

Computer vision techniques are mainly used now a days to detect the fire. There are also many challenges in trying whether the region detected as fire is actually a fire this is perhaps mainly because the color of fire can range from red yellow to almost white. So fire region cannot be detected only by a single feature and many other features (i.e.) color have to be taken into consideration. Early warning and instantaneous responses are the preventing ideas to avoid losses affecting environment as well as human causalities. Conventional fire detection systems use physical sensors to detect fire. Chemical properties of particles in the air are acquired by sensors and are used by conventional fire detection systems to raise an alarm. However, this can also cause false alarms. In order to reduce false alarms of conventional fire detection systems, system make use of vision based fire detection system. This chapter discuss about the fundamentals of videos, various issues in processing video signals, various algorithms for video processing using vision techniques.

An intelligent video-monitoring system to detect falls: a proof of concept

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 155-168
Author(s):  
Nolwenn Lapierre ◽  
Jean Meunier ◽  
Alain St-Arnaud ◽  
Jacqueline Rousseau
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Monitoring System ◽  
Detection System ◽  
Phase 1 ◽  
Fall Detection ◽  
Video Monitoring ◽  
False Alarms ◽  
Proof Of Concept ◽  
Content Type ◽  
At Home

Purpose To face the challenges raised by the high incidence of falls among older adults, the intelligent video-monitoring system (IVS), a fall detection system that respects privacy, was developed. Most fall detection systems are tested only in laboratories. The purpose of this paper is to test the IVS in a simulation context (apartment-laboratory), then at home. Design/methodology/approach This study is a proof of concept including two phases: a simulation study to test the IVS in an apartment-laboratory (29 scenarios of activities including falls); and a 28-day pre-test at home with two young occupants. The IVS’s sensitivity (Se), specificity (Sp), accuracy (A) and error rate (E) in the apartment-laboratory were calculated, and functioning at home was documented in a logbook. Findings For phase 1, results are: Se =91.67 per cent, Sp =99.02 per cent, A=98.25 per cent, E=1.75. For phase 2, the IVS triggered four false alarms and some technical dysfunctions appeared (e.g. computer screen never turning off) that are easily overcome. Practical implications Results show the IVS’s efficacy at automatically detecting falls at home. Potential issues related to future installation in older adults’ homes were identified. This proof of concept led to recommendations about the installation and calibration of a camera-based fall detection system. Originality/value This paper highlights the potentialities of a camera-based fall detection system in real-world contexts and supports the use of the IVS to help older adults age in place.

Effective Falls Detection Method Using Two Tri-Axial Accelerometers

2013 ◽  
Vol 647 ◽  
pp. 854-860
Author(s):  
Gye Rok Jeon ◽  
Young Jae Kim ◽  
Ah Young Jeon ◽  
Sang Hoon Lee ◽  
Jae Hyung Kim ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Activities Of Daily Living ◽  
Daily Living ◽  
Detection Rate ◽  
Elderly Population ◽  
Detection Method ◽  
Detection System ◽  
Fall Detection ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Detection Systems

Falls detection systems have been developed in recent years because falls are detrimental events that can have a devastating effect on health of the elderly population. Current fall detecting methods mainly employ accelerometer to discriminate falls from activities of daily living (ADL). However, this makes it difficult to distinguish real falls from certain fall-like activities such as jogging and jumping. In this paper, an accurate fall detection system was implemented using two tri-axial accelerometers. By attaching the accelerometers on the chest and the abdomen, our system can effectively differentiate between falls and non-fall events.The Diff_Z and Sum_diff_Z parameter resulted in falls detection rate of 100%, respectively.

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