Determination of Fall Direction Before Impact Using Support Vector Machine
Jung Keun Lee · Journal of Sensor Science and Technology · 2015
Fall-related injuries in elderly people are a major health care problem. This paper introduces determination of fall direction before impact using support vector machine (SVM). Once a falling phase is detected, dynamic characteristic parameters measured by the accelerometer and gyroscope and then processed by a Kalman filter are used in the SVM to determine the fall directions, i.e., forward (F), backward (B), rightward (R), and leftward (L). This paper compares the determination sensitivities according to the selected parameters for the SVM (velocities, tilt angles, vs. accelerations) and sensor attachment locations (waist vs. chest) with regards to the binary classification (i.e., F vs. B and R vs. L) and the multi-class classification (i.e., F, B, R, vs. L). Based on the velocity of waist which was superior to other parameters, the SVM in the binary case achieved 100% sensitivities for both F vs. B and R vs. L, while the SVM in the multi-class case achieved the sensitivities of F 93.8%, B 91.3%, R 62.3%, and L 63.6%.