Towards an Accelerometer-Based Elderly Fall Detection System Using Cross-Disciplinary Time Series Features

Fall causes trauma or critical injury among the geriatric population which is a second leading accidental cause of post-injury mortality around the world. It is crucial to keep elderly people under supervision by ensuring proper privacy and comfort. Thus the elderly fall detection and prediction using wearable/non-wearable sensors become an active field of research. In this work, a novel pipeline for fall detection based on wearable accelerometer data has been proposed. Three publicly available datasets have been used to validate our proposed method, and more than 7700 cross-disciplinary time-series features were investigated for each of the datasets. After following a series of feature reduction techniques such as mutual information, removing highly correlated features using the Pearson correlation coefficient, Boruta algorithm, we have obtained the dominant features for each dataset. Different classical machine learning (ML) algorithms were utilized to detect falls based on the obtained features. For individual datasets, the simple ML classifiers achieved very good accuracy. We trained our pipeline with two of the three datasets and tested with the remaining one dataset until all three datasets were used as the test set to show the generalization capability of our proposed pipeline. A set of 39 high-performing features is selected, and the classifiers were trained with them. For all the cases, the proposed pipeline showed excellent efficiency in detecting falls. This architecture performed better than most of the existing works in all the used publicly available datasets, proving the supremacy of the proposed data analysis pipeline.