Evaluating the Efficiency of Several Machine Learning Algorithms for Fall Detection

Abstract

Elderly falls are a growing phenomenon observed within the world. According to World Health Organization (WHO), it is the second leading cause of unintentional or accidental deaths among the elderly. Thus, the need for research regarding the development of fall detection systems is imperative. Researchers have utilized various approaches to develop fall detection systems, significant number of which have employed Machine Leaning (ML) algorithms for fall detection. In this study, we evaluated the efficiency of six ML algorithms on a public fall detection dataset. A robust deep neural network for fall detection (FD-DNN) is identified to be the current state-of-the-art, it detects falls by using a self-built sensor that consumes low power. By evaluating the efficiency of six machine learning algorithms on a publicly available joint fall detection dataset, the accuracy of the fall detection was increased from 99.17% to 99.88% by using the K-nearest Neighbor indicating that common machine learning algorithms can achieve identical or higher accuracy rendering the complex and expensive deep neural network-based fall detection systems inefficient.