Detecting human fall using internet of things devices for healthcare applications

Abstract

Falls pose a significant threat to unintentional injuries, particularly impacting the independence of older individuals. Existing detection methods suffer from drawbacks, including inaccuracies, wearer discomfort, complex setup, resource-intensive computation, and limitations in detecting falls outside a specific setting. In response, our innovative fall detection system integrates with a pneumatic solution, analyzing fundamental human activities like running, walking, and sitting, both indoors and outdoors. This approach combines wearable sensors with a vision-based solution, utilizing a smart belt with embedded accelerometer and gyroscope, alongside wall-installed cameras in a smart house. The system triggers an airbag and sends an emergency alarm upon fall detection. To achieve this, we propose FallMixer a lightweight deep learning model, combined with ‘you only look once’ version 8 (YOLOv8) algorithm, fine-tuned on a collected video dataset to enable real-time detection. We found that the models result in competitive performance, as demonstrated on SisFall, UCI human activity recognition (HAR), and mobile health (MHEALTH) datasets with a remarkable mean average precision. Subsequently, we assess the hardware performance of our solution on edge devices.