An Automated Fall Detection System Using Recurrent Neural Networks

Falls are the most common cause of fatal injuries in elderly people, causing even death if there is no immediate assistance. Fall detection systems can be used to alert and request help when this type of accident happens. Certain types of these systems include wearable devices that analyze bio-medical signals from the person carrying it in real time. In this way, Deep Learning algorithms could automate and improve the detection of unintentional falls by analyzing these signals. These algorithms have proven to achieve high effectiveness with competitive performances in many classification problems. This work aims to study 16 Recurrent Neural Networks architectures (using Long Short-Term Memory and Gated Recurrent Units) for falls detection based on accelerometer data, reducing computational requirements of previous research. The architectures have been tested on a labeled version of the publicly available SisFall dataset, achieving a mean F1-score above 0.73 and improving state-of-the-art solutions in terms of network complexity. Ministerio de Economía y Competitivida TEC2016-77785-P