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I. I NTRODUCTION
Todays smartphones or mobile phones serve as the central
computing and communication device in peoples lives. Such
a trend is inevitable in the real world due to the tremendous
growth in recent years of new smart devices, such as iPhones,
iPads, and Android-based platform, which is expected to
continue. These phones embed various sensors [1], including
accelerometer, digital compass, GPS, and camera, enabling
new applications in various domains such as healthcare,
social networks, and environmental monitoring. This study
focuses on healthcare domain. Traditionally, the information
for personal healthcare largely comes from infrequent doctor
consultations. The sensor-enabled phones have the capabilities
to collect data that can dramatically change the way health
are assessed and how care is delivered. Recently, e-health
leverages the ubiquity of mobile technologies to assist individuals in monitoring symptoms and treatment [2]. For example,
the UbiFit Garden project [3] attempts to capture levels of
physical activity and relates this information to personal health
while feedbacking to the user. These types of systems have the
potential to greatly improve peoples health and quality of life,
while simultaneously reducing overall healthcare costs.
The elderly population is increasing; therefore, various
systems are proposed to improve elderly peoples health and
quality of life. One good example of these systems is fall
detection. This is because falls are a major health risk for
978-1-4577-1719-2/12/$26.00 2012
2015 IEEE
elderly people, diminishing the quality of life or even resulting in death. The fall detection system can be classified
into four categories: image-based systems [4][6], databasebased approach [7], context-aware techniques [8], [9], and
acceleration-based detection [10][13]. Each approach has
its limitations and advantages. For example, the advantage
of image-based and context-aware approaches is an accurate
detection rate; however, it requires the previous camera or
environmental setup and the maintenance of whole architecture. The database-based approach stores various sensed user
behavior into a database for various activities. This system
can be used to recognize different user behaviors. However,
collecting sensed data for every possible activity of daily living
is time consuming and unfeasible. The acceleration-based
detection is the most widely used method, as current high-level
devices build in the acceleration sensors. This study focuses
on acceleration-based detection, utilizing mobile phones as the
platform to detect fall.
This study proposes a low-cost fall detection system, using
the existing devices and wireless technology, without the
need for hardware modification, environmental setup, and
wearing external sensors. The proposed system has three
central components: sensing, learning, and alerting. In the
first component, we take the advantages of the database-based
approach to collect realistic fall data. That is, we collect the
real accelerometer data from the mobile embedded sensors
and record the corresponding user behavior to determine the
required parameters. In the second component, the proposed
system learns the relationship between the fall behavior and
the collected data. In this step, we utilize different fall features,
including vertical and total acceleration, to design different fall
detection algorithms [12]. We also measure the performance in
both sensitivity and specificity while considering their tradeoff [14]. In the third component, the mobile phones alert preconfigured emergency contacts through message. We further
design an interface which allows users to manually disable the
alert to avoid false positive and to reduce transmission costs.
The experimental results show that the proposed system
can recognize the fall from human activities of daily living,
such as sitting, walking and standing, with 72.22% sensitivity
and 73.78% specificity. This study also analyzes the tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity by plotting receiver
operating characteristic [13]. This illustrates how to determine
the parameters to strike a graceful balance between sensitivity
and specificity. The experiment further investigates the impact
of different locations where the phone attached, including
143
Start
Load
Personal
Profile
Load
Threshold
Parameter
Setup
Emergency Notification
Processes
Pre-configured
NO
Yes
Real Time
Monitoring
Stop Alarm
in Time
NO
NO
Exceeds
Trigging
Threshold
Yes
Is Fall or Not
Yes
Fig. 1.
chest, waist, and thigh. The result shows that the performance
of chest is the best. This is because the more high location in
body, the more large change of acceleration will be detected
when falling happened. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the extra power consumption resulting from
the fall detection software.
II. M OBILE PHONE - BASED FALL DETECTION SYSTEM
This section presents the proposed mobile phone-based fall
detection system design. Figure 1 shows the system architecture. The proposed system has three major components: Fall
detection process, system pre-configuration, and emergency
notification, as indicated by different colors in Fig. 1.
In the fall detection process, the mobile device continuously
monitor the sensing data from the embedded sensors in real
time. Here we consider two sensors, tri-axis acceleration
sensor and orientation sensor. The former reports three axis
acceleration values denoted as Ax , Ay and Az , while the latter
provide the value of yaw, pitch and roll orientations, denoted
as x , y and z . In this step, we calculate two parameters
to identify the fall behavior. The first parameter is the overall
acceleration value |AT |, computed as
q
2
2
2
|AT | = |Ax | + |Ay | + |Az |
(1)
(2)
Then, we define two thresholds for these two parameters, respectively. The algorithm is based on these thresholds and the
online-calculated parameters. If the difference value between
maximum |AT |max and minimum |AT |min is larger than the
set |AT |th during a short-period, a fall is considered very likely
happen. Then, we observe the change in vertical acceleration
as a verified procedure. If the vertical acceleration is smaller
than |AV |th during that period, a detection of fall is reported
and the process moves to the next component, emergency
notification.
In the emergency notification process, the mobile phone
starts an alarm message on the screen and records the alarm
(3)
TP
TP + FN
Specificity =
TN
TN + FP
(4)
144
Acceleration (m/s2)
AT (Waist)
25
20
Peak
15
10
5
Walking
Falling
0
0
Sitting
12
Walking
Standing up
16
20
24
28
Time (s)
Fig. 3.
An example of the temporal total acceleration data between different activities during 28 seconds.
Chest
0.9
0.8
0.7
Sensitivity (%)
Waist
Thigh
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
Chest
0.2
Waist
0.1
Thigh
0
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
Specificity (%)
Chest
P eakmax > |AT |th
Sensitivity (%)
Specificity (%)
72.22
73.78
Waist
56.67
66.39
Thigh
53.33
57.22
145
0.9
0.8
Sensitivity (%)
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
0.3
0.2
Single Threshold
0.1
Two Threshold
0
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
R EFERENCES
Specificity (%)
Fig. 5.
95
Normal State
90
85
80
75
70
65
60
0
0.5
1.5
Time (hour)
2.5
146