Unsupervised Fall Detection on Edge Devices

Abstract

Automatic fall detection is a crucial task in healthcare as falls pose a significant risk to the health of elderly individuals. This paper presents a lightweight acceleration-based fall detection method that can be implemented on edge devices. The proposed method uses Autoencoders, a type of unsupervised learning, within the framework of anomaly detection, allowing for network training without requiring extensive labeled fall data. One of the challenges in fall detection is the difficulty in collecting fall data. However, our proposed method can overcome this limitation by training the neural network without fall data, using the anomaly detection framework of Autoencoders. Additionally, this method employs an extremely lightweight Autoencoder that can run independently on an edge device, eliminating the need to transmit data to a server and minimizing privacy concerns. We conducted experiments comparing the performance of our proposed method with that of a baseline method using a unique fall detection dataset. Our results confirm that our method outperforms the baseline method in detecting falls with higher accuracy.