Title
Classification of fall directions via wearable motion sensors
Abstract
Effective fall-detection and classification systems are vital in mitigating severe medical and economical consequences of falls to people in the fall risk groups. One class of such systems is based on wearable sensors. While there is a vast amount of academic work on this class of systems, not much effort has been devoted to the investigation of effective and robust algorithms and like-for-like comparison of state-of-the-art algorithms using a sufficiently large dataset. In this article, fall-direction classification algorithms are presented and compared on an extensive dataset, comprising a total of 1600 fall trials. Eight machine learning classifiers are implemented for fall-direction classification into four basic directions (forward, backward, right, and left). These are, namely, Bayesian decision making (BDM), least squares method (LSM), k-nearest neighbor classifier (k-NN), artificial neural networks (ANNs), support vector machines (SVMs), decision-tree classifier (DTC), random forest (RF), and adaptive boosting or AdaBoost (AB). BDM achieves perfect classification, followed by k-NN, SVM, and RF. Data acquired from only a single motion sensor unit, worn at the waist of the subject, are processed for experimental verification. Four of the classifiers (BDM, LSM, k-NN, and ANN) are modified to handle the presence of data from an unknown class and evaluated on the same dataset. In this robustness analysis, ANN and k-NN yield accuracies above 96.2%. The results obtained in this study are promising in developing real-world fall-classification systems as they enable fast and reliable classification of fall directions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1016/j.dsp.2021.103129
Digital Signal Processing
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Wearables,Wearable sensors,Motion sensors,Fall-direction classification,Machine learning classifiers,Assistive technology
Journal
125
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1051-2004
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mustafa S. Turan101.69
Billur Barshan231327.83