Fall Detection System Based on Simple Threshold Method and Long Short-Term Memory: Comparison with Hidden Markov Model and Extraction of Optimal Parameters

In an aging global society, a few complex problems have been occurring due to falls among the increasing elderly population. Therefore, falls are detected using a pendant-type sensor that can be worn comfortably for fall detection. The sensed data are processed by the embedded environment and classified by a long-term memory (LSTM). A fall detection system that combines a simple threshold method (STM) and LSTM, the STM-LSTM-based fall detection system, is introduced. In terms of training data accuracy, the proposed STM-LSTM-based fall detection system is compared with the previously reported STM-hidden Markov model (HMM)-based fall detection system. The training accuracy of the STM-LSTM fall detection system is 100%, while the highest training accuracy by the STM-HMM-based one is 99.5%, which is 0.5% less than the best of the STM-LSTM-based system. In addition, in the optimized LSTM fall detection system, this may be overfitted because all data are trained without separating any validation data. In order to resolve the possible overfitting issue, training and validation data are evaluated separately in 4:1, and then in terms of validation data accuracy of the STM-LSTM-based fall detection system, optimal values of the parameters in LSTM and normalization method are found as follows: best accuracy of 98.21% at no-normalization, no-sampling, 128hidden layer nodes, and regularization rate of 0.015. It is also observed that as the number of hidden layer nodes or sampling interval increases, the regularization rate at the highest value of accuracy increases. This means that overfitting can be suppressed by increasing the regularization, and thus an appropriate number of hidden layer nodes and a regularization rate must be selected to improve the fall detection efficiency.

Automated summary

In an aging society, the issue of falls among the elderly has become increasingly prominent. This study presents a fall detection system that combines a simple threshold method and long-term memory. The results show that the proposed system achieves higher accuracy compared to previous systems. To address the issue of overfitting, parameter optimization is conducted.