The Identification of Elderly People with High Fall Risk Using Machine Learning Algorithms

Abstract

Falling is an important public health issue, and predicting the fall risk can reduce the incidence of injury events in the elderly. However, most of the existing studies may have additional human and financial costs for community workers and doctors. Therefore, it is socially important to identify elderly people who are at high fall risk through a reasonable and cost-effective method. We evaluated the potential of multifractal, machine learning algorithms to identify the elderly at high fall risk. We developed a 42-point calibration model of the human body and recorded the three-dimensional coordinate datasets. The stability of the motion trajectory is calculated by the multifractal algorithm and used as an input dimension to compare the performance of the six classifiers. The results showed that the instability of the faller group was significantly greater than that of the no-faller group in the male and female cohorts (p < 0.005), and the Gradient Boosting Decision Tree classifier showed the best performance. The findings could help elderly people at high fall risk to identify individualized risk factors and facilitate tailored fall interventions.