Smart Application for Fall Detection Using Wearable ECG & Accelerometer Sensors

Abstract: Timely and reliable detection of falls is a large and rapidly growing field of research due to the medical and financial demand of caring for a constantly growing elderly population. Within the past 2 decades, the availability of high-quality hardware (high-quality sensors and AI microchips) and software (machine learning algorithms) technologies has served as a catalyst for this research by giving developers the capabilities to develop such systems. This study developed multiple application components in order to investigate the development challenges and choices for fall detection systems, and provide materials for future research. The smart application developed using this methodology was validated by the results from fall detection modelling experiments and model mobile deployment. The best performing model overall was the ResNet152 on a standardised, and shuffled dataset with a 2s window size which achieved 92.8% AUC, 87.28% sensitivity, and 98.33% specificity. Given these results it is evident that accelerometer and ECG sensors are beneficial for fall detection, and allow for the discrimination between falls and other activities. This study leaves a significant amount of room for improvement due to weaknesses identified in the resultant dataset. These improvements include using a labelling protocol for the critical phase of a fall, increasing the number of dataset samples, improving the test subject representation, and experimenting with frequency domain preprocessing.