Falls worthy of detection and detection methods based on mmWave radar

What is it about?

Falls are the leading cause of fatal injuries to elders in modern society, which has motivated researchers to propose various fall detection technologies. We observe that most of the existing fall detection solutions are diverging from the purpose of fall detection: timely alarming the family members, medical staff or first responders to save the life of the human with severe injury caused by fall. Instead, they focus on detecting the behavior of human falls, which does not necessarily mean a human is in real danger. The real critical situation is when a human cannot get up without assistance and is thus lying on the ground after the fall because of losing consciousness or becoming incapacitated due to severe injury. In this paper, we define a life-threatening fall as a behavior that involves a falling down followed by a long-lie of humans on the ground, and for the first time point out that a fall detection system should focus on detecting life-threatening falls instead of detecting any random falls. Accordingly, we design and implement LT-Fall, a mmWave-based life-threatening fall detection and alarming system. LT-Fall detects and reports both fall and fall-like behaviors in the first stage and then identifies life-threatening falls by continuously monitoring the human status after fall in the second stage. We propose a joint spatio-temporal localization technique to detect and locate the micro-motions of the human, which solves the challenge of mmWave's insufficient spatial resolution when the human is static, i.e., lying on the ground. Extensive evaluation on 15 volunteers demonstrates that compared to the state-of-the-art work (92% precision and 94% recall), LT-Fall achieves zero false alarms as well as a precision of 100% and a recall of 98.8%.

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Why is it important?

For the first time, we point out that the fall detection system should focus on detecting life-threatening falls instead of detecting any random falls. Accordingly, we propose a lifethreatening falls detection system that consists of two stages: the first stage, similar to existing solutions, detects both falls and fall-like behaviors; the second stage filters out falls that are not life-threatening and fall-like behaviors by continuously monitoring the human status after the fall