Predicting a Fall Based on Gait Anomaly Detection: A Comparative Study of Wrist-Worn Three-Axis and Mobile Phone-Based Accelerometer Sensors

Abstract

Falls by the elderly pose considerable health hazards, leading not only to physical harm but a number of other related problems. A timely alert about a deteriorating gait, as an indication of an impending fall, can assist in fall prevention. In this investigation, a comprehensive comparative analysis was conducted between a commercially available mobile phone system and two wristband systems: one commercially available and another representing a novel approach. Each system was equipped with a singular three-axis accelerometer. The walk suggestive of a potential fall was induced by special glasses worn by the participants. The same standard machine-learning techniques were employed for the classification with all three systems based on a single three-axis accelerometer, yielding a best average accuracy of 86%, a specificity of 88%, and a sensitivity of 86% via the support vector machine (SVM) method using a wristband. A smartphone, on the other hand, achieved a best average accuracy of 73% also with an SVM using only a three-axis accelerometer sensor. The significance analysis of the mean accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity between the innovative wristband and the smartphone yielded a p-value of 0.000. Furthermore, the study applied unsupervised and semi-supervised learning methods, incorporating principal component analysis and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding. To sum up, both wristbands demonstrated the usability of wearable sensors in the early detection and mitigation of falls in the elderly, outperforming the smartphone.