Abstract
Unintentional falls can cause severe injuries and even death, especially if no immediate assistance is given. The aim of Fall Detection Systems (FDSs) is to detect an occurring fall in real time therefore issuing a remote notification. An accurate FDS can drastically improve the quality of life of elderly subjects or any other person at risk. In this chapter we focus on real-time Automatic Fall Detection (AFD) performed onboard smart wearable devices. In particular, in this chapter we discuss the feasibility of AFDs methods based on Deep Learning (DL) techniques that could fit the limited computation power and memory of smaller low-power Micro-Controller Units (MCUs). The chapter proves that a relatively simple Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architecture, based on two Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) cells, could be a viable candidate for embedded AFD. Tests were performed using the SisFall dataset, which includes sequences of tri-axial accelerometer and gyroscope readings for simulated falls performed by volunteers. This dataset was further annotated for training the RNN architecture. The resulting AFD method is shown to outperform other methods based on statistical indicators, as reported in the literature. The embedded feasibility of such approach is validated with an implementation for the SensorTile ® by STMicroelectronics hardware architecture.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Martín Abadi, Paul Barham, Jianmin Chen, Zhifeng Chen, Andy Davis, Jeffrey Dean, Matthieu Devin, Sanjay Ghemawat, Geoffrey Irving, Michael Isard, et al. Tensorflow: A system for large-scale machine learning. In 12th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI16), pages 265–283, 2016.
Stefano Abbate, Marco Avvenuti, Francesco Bonatesta, Guglielmo Cola, Paolo Corsini, and Alessio Vecchio. A smartphone-based fall detection system. Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 8(6):883–899, 2012.
G. Baldewijns, G. Debard, G. Mertes, T. Croonenborghs, and B. Vanrumste. Improving the accuracy of existing camera based fall detection algorithms through late fusion. In 2017 39th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), pages 2667–2671, July 2017.
A. Bourke and G. Lyons. A threshold-based fall-detection algorithm using a bi-axial gyroscope sensor. Medical Engineering & Physics, 30(1):84–90, 2008.
Eduardo Casilari, Jose A. Santoyo-Ramón, and Jose M. Cano-García. Umafall: A multisensor dataset for the research on automatic fall detection. Procedia Computer Science, 110:32–39, 2017.
P. Feng, M. Yu, S. M. Naqvi, and J. A. Chambers. Deep learning for posture analysis in fall detection. In 2014 19th International Conference on Digital Signal Processing, pages 12–17, Aug 2014.
Jane Fleming and Carol Brayne. Inability to get up after falling, subsequent time on floor, and summoning help: prospective cohort study in people over 90. BMJ, 337, 2008.
Korbinian Frank, Maria Josefa Vera Nadales, Patrick Robertson, and Tom Pfeifer. Bayesian recognition of motion related activities with inertial sensors. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference - Adjunct Papers on Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp ’10 Adjunct, pages 445–446, 2010.
Ryan M. Gibson, Abbes Amira, Naeem Ramzan, Pablo Casaseca de-la Higuera, and Zeeshan Pervez. Multiple comparator classifier framework for accelerometer-based fall detection and diagnostic. Applied Soft Computing, 39:94–103, 2016.
Geoffrey E. Hinton, Nitish Srivastava, Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Ruslan Salakhutdinov. Improving neural networks by preventing co-adaptation of feature detectors. CoRR, abs/1207.0580, 2012.
S. Hochreiter and J. Schmidhuber. Long short-term memory. Neural Computation, 9(8):1735–1780, Nov 1997.
Sergey Ioffe and Christian Szegedy. Batch normalization: Accelerating deep network training by reducing internal covariate shift. CoRR, abs/1502.03167, 2015.
M. Kepski and B. Kwolek. Fall detection using ceiling-mounted 3d depth camera. In 2014 International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (VISAPP), volume 2, pages 640–647, Jan 2014.
Q. Li, J. Stankovic, M. Hanson, A. Barth, J. Lach, and G. Zhou. Accurate, fast fall detection using gyroscopes and accelerometer derived posture information. In Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks, pages 138–143, 2009.
Carlos Medrano, Raul Igual, Inmaculada Plaza, and Manuel Castro. Detecting falls as novelties in acceleration patterns acquired with smartphones. PLOS ONE, 9(4):1–9, 04 2014.
O. Mohamed, H. J. Choi, and Y. Iraqi. Fall detection systems for elderly care: A survey. In 2014 6th International Conference on New Technologies, Mobility and Security (NTMS), pages 1–4, March 2014.
Francisco Javier Ordóñez and Daniel Roggen. Deep convolutional and lstm recurrent neural networks for multimodal wearable activity recognition. Sensors, 16(1):115, 2016.
Natthapon Pannurat, Surapa Thiemjarus, and Ekawit Nantajeewarawat. Automatic Fall Monitoring: A Review. Sensors, 14(7):12900–12936, July 2014.
Angela Sucerquia, José López, and Jesús Vargas-Bonilla. Sisfall: A fall and movement dataset. Sensors, 17(1):198, 2017.
P. Tsinganos and A. Skodras. A smartphone-based fall detection system for the elderly. In Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Image and Signal Processing and Analysis, pages 53–58, Sept 2017.
George Vavoulas, Matthew Pediaditis, Charikleia Chatzaki, Emmanouil Spanakis, and Manolis Tsiknakis. The mobifall dataset: Fall detection and classification with a smartphone. International Journal of Monitoring and Surveillance Technologies Research, 2016.
T. Vilarinho, B. Farshchian, D. G. Bajer, O. H. Dahl, I. Egge, S. S. Hegdal, A. Lønes, J. N. Slettevold, and S. M. Weggersen. A combined smartphone and smartwatch fall detection system. In 2015 IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology, pages 1443–1448, Oct 2015.
World Health Organization. WHO global report on falls prevention in older age. World Health Organization Geneva, 2008.
Yundong Zhang, Naveen Suda, Liangzhen Lai, and Vikas Chandra. Hello edge: Keyword spotting on microcontrollers. CoRR, abs/1711.07128, 2017.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the financial support from Regione Lombardia, under the “Home of IoT” project (ID: 139625), co-funded by POR FESR 2014–2020. The authors would like to thank Nicola Blago, Daniele De Martini and Tullio Facchinetti for their contributions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Musci, M., Piastra, M. (2021). Recurrent Neural Networks Architectures for Accidental Fall Detection on Wearable Embedded Devices. In: Elloumi, M. (eds) Deep Learning for Biomedical Data Analysis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71676-9_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71676-9_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-71675-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-71676-9
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life SciencesBiomedical and Life Sciences (R0)