Pre-Impact Fall Detection with CNN-Based Class Activation Mapping Method

Abstract

In this paper, we report our improvement on the prediction accuracy of pre-impact fall detection by applying a learning-based method on the real-time data from an IMU (inertial measurement unit)-sensor mounted on the waist, making it possible to achieve a high accuracy on a wearable device with the extracted features. Using the fixed threshold method is difficult for achieving satisfactory detection accuracy, due to various characteristics and behaviors in the movement of different individuals. In contrast, one could realize high-accuracy detection with machine learning-based methods, but it is difficult to apply them in the wearable devices due to the high hardware requirement. Our method merges the two methods above. We build a convolutional neural network (CNN) with a class activation mapping (CAM) method, which could highlight the class-specific region in the data and obtain a hot map of the fall data. After training on the MobiAct dataset, the model could achieve high-accuracy detection (95.55%) and obtain the region with high contributions to the classification. Then, we manually extract effective features and characteristics of this region and form our special threshold method, achieving pre-impact fall detection in real-world data. Consequently, our method achieves accuracy of 95.33% and a detection time of within 400 ms.

Keywords

• fall detection
• pre-impact
• neural network
• threshold-based
• IMU