Skip to main content

What if Your Floor Could Tell Someone You Fell? A Device Free Fall Detection Method

  • Conference paper
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9105))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Falls in the home environment are a serious cause of injury in older people leading to loss of independence and increased health related financial costs. In this study we investigate a device free method to detect falls by using simple batteryless radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in a smart RFID enabled carpet. Our method extracts information from the tags and the environment of the carpeted floor and applies machine learning techniques to make an autonomous decision regarding the posture of a person on the floor. This information can be used to automatically seek assistance to help the subject and decrease the negative effects of ‘long-lie’ after a fall. Our approach does not require video monitoring or body worn kinematic sensors; hence preserves the privacy of the dwellers, reduces costs and eliminates the need to remember to wear a device. Our results indicate a good performance for fall detection with an overall F-score of 94%.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Bhuptani, M., Moradpour, S.: RFID Field Guide: Deploying Radio Frequency Identification Systems. Prentice Hall (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Bianchi, F., Redmond, S., Narayanan, M., Cerutti, S., Lovell, N.: Barometric pressure and triaxial accelerometry-based falls event detection. IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering 18(6), 619–627 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Bourke, A., van de Ven, P., Gamble, M., OConnor, R., Murphy, K., Bogan, E., McQuade, E., Finucane, P., Laighin, G., Nelson, J.: Evaluation of waist-mounted tri-axial accelerometer based fall-detection algorithms during scripted and continuous unscripted activities. Journal of Biomechanics 43(15), 3051–3057 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Braun, A., Heggen, H., Wichert, R.: Capfloor - a flexible capacitive indoor localization system. In: Chessa, S., Knauth, S. (eds.) EvAAL 2011. CCIS, vol. 309, pp. 26–35. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  5. Breiman, L., Friedman, J., Stone, C.J., Olshen, R.A.: Classification and regression trees. Wadsworth International Group, Belmont (1984)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  6. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Cost of falls among older adults (2014), http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/falls/fallcost.html

  7. Cortes, C., Vapnik, V.: Support-vector networks. Machine Learning 20(3), 273–297 (1995)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  8. Demiris, G., Hensel, B.K., Skubic, M., Rantz, M.: Senior residents’ perceived need of and preferences for “smart home” sensor technologies. International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care 24, 120–124 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Donelson, S.M., Gordon, C.C.: 1995 Matched anthropometric database of US Marine Corps personnel: Summary statistics. Tech. rep., GEO Centers INC (1995), http://www.humanics-es.com/ADA316646.pdf

  10. Doukas, C., Maglogiannis, I.: Emergency fall incidents detection in assisted living environments utilizing motion, sound, and visual perceptual components. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine 15(2), 277–289 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. EPCglobal Inc: EPC radio-frequency identity protocols, class-1 generation-2 UHF RFID (2008), http://www.gs1.org/gsmp/kc/epcglobal/

  12. Fan, R.E., Chang, K.W., Hsieh, C.J., Wang, X.R., Lin, C.J.: LIBLINEAR: A library for large linear classification. Journal of Machine Learning Research 9, 1871–1874 (2008)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  13. Finkenzeller, K.: RFID handbook: fundamentals and applications in contactless smart cards, radio frequency identification and near-field communication. Wiley (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  14. He, H., Garcia, E.: Learning from imbalanced data. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 21(9), 1263–1284 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Klack, L., Möllering, C., Ziefle, M., Schmitz-Rode, T.: Future care floor: A sensitive floor for movement monitoring and fall detection in home environments. In: Lin, J., Nikita, K.S. (eds.) MobiHealth 2010. LNICST, vol. 55, pp. 211–218. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  16. Lan, M., Nahapetian, A., Vahdatpour, A., Au, L., Kaiser, W., Sarrafzadeh, M.: Smartfall: an automatic fall detection system based on subsequence matching for the smartcane. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Body Area Networks, BodyNets 2009, ICST, Brussels, Belgium, pp. 8:1–8:8 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Li, Q., Stankovic, J., Hanson, M., Barth, A., Lach, J., Zhou, G.: Accurate, fast fall detection using gyroscopes and accelerometer-derived posture information. In: 6th International Workshop on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks, BSN 2009, pp. 138–143. IEEE (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Lord, S.R., Sherrington, C., Menz, H.B., Close, J.C.: Falls in older people: risk factors and strategies for prevention. Cambridge University Press (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Oliver, D., Healey, F., Haines, T.P.: Preventing falls and fall-related injuries in hospitals. Clinics in Geriatric Medicine 26(4), 645–692 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Qian, H., Mao, Y., Xiang, W., Wang, Z.: Home environment fall detection system based on a cascaded multi-SVM classifier. In: 10th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision, ICARCV 2008, pp. 1567–1572 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Robinovitch, S.N., Feldman, F., Yang, Y., Schonnop, R., Lueng, P.M., Sarraf, T., Sims-Gould, J., Loughin, M.: Video capture of the circumstances of falls in elderly people residing in long-term care: an observational study. The Lancet 381(9860), 47–54 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Werner, F., Diermaier, J., Schmid, S., Panek, P.: Fall detection with distributed floor-mounted accelerometers: An overview of the development and evaluation of a fall detection system within the project eHome. In: 5th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, pp. 354–361 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Roberto Luis Shinmoto Torres .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Shinmoto Torres, R.L., Wickramasinghe, A., Pham, V.N., Ranasinghe, D.C. (2015). What if Your Floor Could Tell Someone You Fell? A Device Free Fall Detection Method. In: Holmes, J., Bellazzi, R., Sacchi, L., Peek, N. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. AIME 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9105. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19551-3_10

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19551-3_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-19550-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-19551-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics