Biomedical Radar System for Real-Time Contactless Fall Detection and Indoor Localization

Abstract

Fall incidents represent a major public health problem among elderly people. This resulted in a significant increase of the number of investigated systems aiming at detecting falls promptly. In this respect, in this work, a biomedical radar system is proposed for remote real-time fall detection and indoor localization. The system, consisting of a sensor and a base station, combines radar and wireless communication techniques, and uses a data processing technique to distinguish between fall events and normal movements. The classification, based on a Least-Square Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM), combined with the sliding window principle allows to perform fall detection in real-time. Moreover, it is capable to localize the subjects when the fall incident has been detected. The in-vivo validation showed a high success rate in detecting fall events, with a maximum delay of 340 ms. Moreover, a maximum mean absolute errors (MAE) of 3.8 cm and a maximum root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 7.5 cm were reported in measuring the subject's absolute distance.

TinyFallNet: A Lightweight Pre-Impact Fall Detection Model

“…Generally, sensitivity is considered more crucial from a safety perspective. However, frequent false alarms can cause user discomfort and lead to users forgetting to wear the device [30]. Moreover, when applied to wearable airbags, false alarms leading to airbag deployment can become another cause of injury, especially for elderly individuals with impaired balance.…”

A Review and Tutorial on Machine Learning-Enabled Radar-Based Biomedical Monitoring

“…A different picture emerges in the ethical principles justice and fairness, non-maleficence, privacy, and beneficence, starting with beneficence: In addition to technical benefits, the results analyzed also mention medical benefits [108], [109], [119], economic benefits [102], regulatory benefits [111], and social-ethical benefits. The latter arise, for instance, from avoiding privacy issues [102], [119], addressing social needs in healthcare [108], and enabling outdoor or home monitoring [102]. Nahar describes medical benefits "[...] in terms of convenience and accuracy in diagnosis, treatment, and detection of emergency situations in home and clinical environments" [105].…”

“…Radar technology is often promoted as being less privacyinvasive than common methods of vital sign measurements. While some authors do not see any breach of privacy in the use of radar systems at all [102], [119], radar-based monitoring is often compared to camera-or video-based devices, for which privacy concerns are raised [105], [108], [110], [119], [120]. Others highlight the possibility of reducing the invasion of privacy [101] or naming the preservation of privacy as one of its unique advantages [107].…”