A Lightweight Temporal Convolutional Network for Contactless SPPB-Aligned Functional Fall-Risk Stratification in...

Falls among older adults remain a major public health concern, yet scalable and interpretable sensing approaches for functional fall-risk stratification remain limited. This study presents a lightweight contactless framework for five-level Short Physical Performance Battery (SPPB)-aligned functional fall-risk stratification using monocular RGB video. A total of 688 community-dwelling older adults completed SPPB-aligned assessments, including balance, five-times sit-to-stand, and 3 m gait tasks. Because prospective fall-event outcomes were unavailable, supervised labels were constructed from a pre-specified SPPB-aligned functional risk index rather than observed future falls. BlazePose-based two-dimensional keypoints were extracted, normalized using pelvis-centered and height-scaled transformations, and represented as temporal skeletal trajectories. Biomechanical descriptors were fused with embeddings from the proposed Temporal Convolutional Artificial Intelligence Fall-Risk Network (TCAI-FallNet). Participant-level data partitioning was used to reduce data leakage. TCAI-FallNet achieved a macro-averaged area under the curve of 0.91 and an overall accuracy of 81.3%. The trained model had a footprint under 3 MB, and TCN inference latency was below 20 ms per sequence under workstation-based evaluation. These findings suggest that TCAI-FallNet may support contactless SPPB-aligned functional mobility risk stratification, while prospective fall-event validation remains necessary.