Action monitoring in a home environment provides important information for health monitoring and may serve as input into a smart home environment. Visual analysis using cameras can recognise actions in a complex scene, such as someones living room. However, although there the huge potential benefits and importance, specifically for health, cameras are not widely accepted because of privacy concerns. This paper recognises human activities using a sensor that retains privacy. The sensor is not only different by being thermal, but it is also of low resolution: 8x8 pixels. The combination of the thermal imaging, and the low spatial resolution ensures the privacy of individuals. We present an approach to recognise daily activities using this sensor based on a discrete cosine transform. We evaluate the proposed method on a state-of-the-art dataset and experimentally confirm that our approach outperforms the baseline method. We also introduce a new dataset, and evaluate the method on it. Here we show that the sensor is considered better at detecting the occurrence of falls and Activities of Daily Living. Our method achieves an overall accuracy of 87.50 across 7 activities with a fall detection sensitivity of 100 and specificity of 99.21 .
A large amount of research is underway in the development of a smart sensing system to detect falls in home environments. However, the use of thermal infrared arrays for fall detection has to date not been widely investigated. Although a real-time system to recognise fall and non-fall events has been presented in @cite_13 , their study overlooks the complexity of non-fall actions, where some actions, such as sitting down and inactivity, can be confused with falling @cite_3 . Taking this into consideration, various non-fall activities are specifically incorporated in our dataset, including those most likely to be confused with falling.
@cite_13 @cite_3
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A method for detecting falls in the homes of older adults using the Microsoft Kinect and a two-stage fall detection system is presented. The first stage of the detection system characterizes a person's vertical state in individual depth image frames, and then segments on ground events from the vertical state time series obtained by tracking the person over time. The second stage uses an ensemble of decision trees to compute a confidence that a fall preceded on a ground event. Evaluation was conducted in the actual homes of older adults, using a combined nine years of continuous data collected in 13 apartments. The dataset includes 454 falls, 445 falls performed by trained stunt actors and nine naturally occurring resident falls. The extensive data collection allows for characterization of system performance under real-world conditions to a degree that has not been shown in other studies. Cross validation results are included for standing, sitting, and lying down positions, near (within 4 m) versus far fall locations, and occluded versus not occluded fallers. The method is compared against five state-of-the-art fall detection algorithms and significantly better results are achieved. This paper presents new approach for unobtrusive indoor fall detection by an IR thermal array sensor. Unlike existing methods that run fall detection at server and require high communication and processing rates, we perform fall detection within the sensor node by a computationally inexpensive algorithm that signals the server only when a fall occurs. Experiments with prototype design show that such formulation provides robust and real-time fall detection even in a noisy environment. Fall incidents have been reported as the second most common cause of death, especially for elderly people. Human fall detection is necessary in smart home healthcare systems. Recently various fall detection approaches have been proposed., among which computer vision based approaches offer a promising and effective way. In this paper, we proposed a new framework for fall detection based on automatic feature learning methods. First, the extracted frames, including human from video sequences of different views, form the training set. Then, a PCANet model is trained by using all samples to predict the label of every frame. Because a fall behavior is contained in many continuous frames, the reliable fall detection should not only analyze one frame but also a video sequence. Based on the prediction result of the trained PCANet model for each frame, an action model is further obtained by SVM with the predicted labels of frames in video sequences. Experiments show that the proposed method achieved reliable results compared with other commonly used methods based on the multiple cameras fall dataset, and a better result is further achieved in our dataset which contains more training samples. More than one third of about 38 million adults 65 and older fall each year in the United States. To address the above problem we propose to develop an acoustic fall detection system (FADE) that will automatically signal a fall to the monitoring caregiver. As opposed to many existent fall detection systems that require the monitored person to wear devices such as accelerometers or gyroscopes at all times, our system is completely unobtrusive by not requiring any wearable devices. To reduce the false alarm rate we employ an array of acoustic sensors to obtain sound source height information. The sound is considered a false alarm if it comes from a source located at a height higher than 2 feet. We tested our system in a pilot study that consisted of a set of 23 falls performed by a stunt actor during six sessions of about 15 minutes each (1.3 hours in total). The actor was previously trained by our nursing collaborators to fall like an elderly person. The use of height information reduced the false alarm hourly rate from 32 to 5 at a 100 fall detection rate.