Enhancing elderly care: Efficient and reliable real-time fall detection algorithm

Falls pose a significant risk to public health, especially for the elderly population, and could potentially result in severe injuries or even death. A reliable fall detection system is urgently needed to recognise and promptly alert to falls effectively. A vision-based fall detection system has the advantage of being non-invasive and affordable compared with another popular approach using wearable sensors. Nevertheless, the present challenge lies in the algorithm's limited on-device operating speed due to extremely high computational demands, and the high computational demands are usually essential to improve the performance for the complex scene. Therefore, it is crucial to address the above challenge in computational power and complex scenes.

This article presents the implementation of a real-time fall detection algorithm with low computational costs using a single webcam. The suggested method optimises precision and efficiency by synthesising the strengths of background subtraction and the human pose estimation model BlazePose. The biomechanical features, derived from body key points identified by BlazePose, are utilised in a random forest model for classifying fall events.

The proposed algorithm achieves 89.99% accuracy and 29.7 FPS with a laptop CPU on the UR Fall Detection dataset and the Le2i Fall Detection dataset. The algorithm shows great generalisation and robustness in different scenarios.

Due to the low computational power of the system, the findings also suggest the potential for implementing the system in small-scale medical monitoring equipment, which maximises its practical value in digital health.