Efficient Fall Detection using Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory

Falls are one of the most common causes of injury among the elderly. As a result, fall detection has received in the last decade considerable attention from both academia and the healthcare industry. Accelerometer data, collected from simulated falls, were widely used with classical machine learning (ML) algorithms as well as with threshold-based methods to identify fall situations that can be used to launch an alert for help. As collecting real fall data is challenging, most of the research papers on fall detection have used limited data which do not reflect the complexity of real fall situations. Fortunately, a comprehensive fall dataset called “Simulated Falls and Daily Living Activities Dataset” has recently become available. This dataset includes 1827 simulated falls of 20 different types. In this paper, we use this dataset to evaluate the possibility of fall detection, more precisely, impact and pre-impact which correspond to fall and pre-fall, respectively. Unlike the classical ML algorithms and threshold-based methods commonly used in previous research works, in this paper, we implement a bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) algorithm which we believe better reflects the impact and pre-impact context as it takes into consideration both backward and forward sequence information at every time step. Our experimental results showed that Bi-LSTM achieves an accuracy of 99.97% and 99.95%, with 99.80% and 99.30% sensitivity, and 100% and 99.99% specificity for fall and pre-fall detections, respectively. These results largely exceed previously published results.