An Effective Deep Learning Framework for Fall Detection: Model Development and Study Design

Abstract

Background Fall detection is of great significance in safeguarding human health. By monitoring the motion data, a fall detection system (FDS) can detect a fall accident. Recently, wearable sensors–based FDSs have become the mainstream of research, which can be categorized into threshold-based FDSs using experience, machine learning–based FDSs using manual feature extraction, and deep learning (DL)–based FDSs using automatic feature extraction. However, most FDSs focus on the global information of sensor data, neglecting the fact that different segments of the data contribute variably to fall detection. This shortcoming makes it challenging for FDSs to accurately distinguish between similar human motion patterns of actual falls and fall-like actions, leading to a decrease in detection accuracy. Objective This study aims to develop and validate a DL framework to accurately detect falls using acceleration and gyroscope data from wearable sensors. We aim to explore the essential contributing features extracted from sensor data to distinguish falls from activities of daily life. The significance of this study lies in reforming the FDS by designing a weighted feature representation using DL methods to effectively differentiate between fall events and fall-like activities. Methods Based on the 3-axis acceleration and gyroscope data, we proposed a new DL architecture, the dual-stream convolutional neural network self-attention (DSCS) model. Unlike previous studies, the used architecture can extract global feature information from acceleration and gyroscope data. Additionally, we incorporated a self-attention module to assign different weights to the original feature vector, enabling the model to learn the contribution effect of the sensor data and enhance classification accuracy. The proposed model was trained and tested on 2 public data sets: SisFall and MobiFall. In addition, 10 participants were recruited to carry out practical validation of the DSCS model. A total of 1700 trials were performed to test the generalization ability of the model. Results The fall detection accuracy of the DSCS model was 99.32% (recall=99.15%; precision=98.58%) and 99.65% (recall=100%; precision=98.39%) on the test sets of SisFall and MobiFall, respectively. In the ablation experiment, we compared the DSCS model with state-of-the-art machine learning and DL models. On the SisFall data set, the DSCS model achieved the second-best accuracy; on the MobiFall data set, the DSCS model achieved the best accuracy, recall, and precision. In practical validation, the accuracy of the DSCS model was 96.41% (recall=95.12%; specificity=97.55%). Conclusions This study demonstrates that the DSCS model can significantly improve the accuracy of fall detection on 2 publicly available data sets and performs robustly in practical validation.