GBDT-Based Fall Detection with Comprehensive Data from Posture Sensor and Human Skeleton Extraction

Since fall is happening with increasing frequency, it has been a major public health problem in an aging society. There are considerable demands to distinguish fall down events of seniors with the characteristics of accurate detection and real-time alarm. However, some daily activities are erroneously signaled as falls and there are too many false alarms in actual application. In order to resolve this problem, this paper designs and implements a comprehensive fall detection framework on the basis of inertial posture sensors and surveillance cameras. In the proposed system framework, data sources representing behavior characteristics to indicate potential fall are derived from wearable triaxial accelerometers and monitoring videos of surveillance cameras. Moreover, the NB-IoT based communication mode is adopted to transmit wearable sensory data to the Internet for subsequent analysis. Furthermore, a Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) classifier-based fall detection algorithm (GBDT-FD in short) with comprehensive data fusion of posture sensor and human video skeleton is proposed to improve detection accuracy. Experimental results verify the good performance of the proposed GBDT-FD algorithm compared to six kinds of existing fall detection algorithms, including SVM-based fall detection, NN-based fall detection, etc. Finally, we implement the proposed integrated systems including wearable posture sensors and monitoring software on the Cloud Server.