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Abstract - A critical performance drawback of most fall detection systems is high false alarms. These false alarms are due to the imbalanced mix of the "fall" and "non-fall" data contained in the processed datasets on one hand, and the inherent limitation of the processing algorithms, on the other hand. To tackle this false alarm problem, a two-tier solution approach which entails Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling Technique (SMOTE) and hybrid of two machine learning algorithms (Multiple-Kernel Support Vector Machine (MK-SVM) and Multinomial Naive Bayes (MNB), hereafter known as SMOTE-based MKSVM-MNB is proposed. The results of simulation experiments performed using two open-source datasets namely SisFall Dataset and UMAFall Dataset show that SMOTE-based MKSVM-MNB significantly outperforms MKSVM, MNB and MKSVM-MNB in terms of the number of False Negatives (FN) recorded. Also, MKSVM-MNB significantly outperforms MKSVM and MNB in terms of FN.
Keywords: activities of daily living, fall detection, false negatives, imbalance, machine learning, oversampling.
I.INTRODUCTION
Adverse effects of falls include injuries such as; fractures, open wounds, bruises, sprains, joint dislocations, brain injuries, and strained muscles [11]. As falls occur more frequently amongst the elderly population, a twelve month study of 2,096 elderly people aged over 65 years in Nigeria discovered that, 23% of the all elderly people in the country experience a fall every year. From this estimate, 45% of women and 30% of men sustain serious injuries, including hip fractures [2].
Falls have also been reported as part of the common occurrences in COVID-19 patients undergoing intensive care, while being monitored in hospital isolated units or homes [7]. Besides the cost that could be involved in treating a fall victim, a lot of the negative impacts emerge when a fall is not detected early enough. A fall victim untended after a fall is more likely to develop complications such as, gastrointestinal bleeding, urinarytract infections, pneumonia, ulcer, myocardial infarction, and chest pain [3].
Moreover, most fall victims who were unable to get up in time, have been reported to have a decrease in their ability to perform basic activities of daily living for three consecutive days, after the fall incidence [9]. This means that help must be provided as soon as the victim experiences a fall in order to reduce its resultant complications.
In order to assist...