FALL DETECTION USING THREE WEARABLE TRIAXIAL ACCELEROMETERS AND A DECISION-TREE CLASSIFIER

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Abstract
Unintentional falls cause serious health problem and high medical cost, particularly among the elders. Efficient fall detection can ensure fallen subjects with timely rescue, less pain and lower health-care expense. However, the accuracy of the present fall detection system with single accelerometer does not meet the requirement of practical application. In this paper, a fall detection method using three wearable triaxial accelerometers and a decision-tree classifier is proposed. The three triaxial accelerometers are, respectively mounted on the head, the waist and the ankle to capture the acceleration signals of human movement. A Kalman filter is adopted to estimate the body tilt angle. After the features are extracted, the trained decision-tree model is used to predict the fall. The efficiency improvement is evidenced by the scripted and unscripted lateral fall experiments, involving five young healthy volunteers (three males and two females; age: 23.3 ± 1 years). The classification of fall and activities of daily living (ADL) achieve recall, precision and F-value of 93.1%, 95.9%, and 94.5%, respectively, and the system detects all falls during the extended unscripted trials. The experimental results indicate that the complementary movement information coming from three accelerometers can enhance the performance of fall detection. The proposed method is efficient, and it has remarkable improvements in comparison to the method of using one or two accelerometers.

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