Smartwatch-Based IoT Fall Detection Application

This paper proposes using only the streaming accelerometer data from a commodity-based smartwatch (IoT) device to detect falls. The smartwatch is paired with a smartphone as a means for performing the computation necessary for the prediction of falls in realtime without incurring latency in communicating with a cloud server while also preserving data privacy. The majority of current fall detection applications require specially designed hardware and software which make them expensive and inaccessible to the general public. Moreover, a fall detection application that uses a wrist worn smartwatch for data collection has the added benefit that it can be perceived as a piece of jewelry and thus non-intrusive. We experimented with both Support Vector Machine and Naive Bayes machine learning algorithms for the creation of the fall model. We demonstrated that by adjusting the sampling frequency of the streaming data, computing acceleration features over a sliding window, and using a Naive Bayes machine learning model, we can obtain the true positive rate of fall detection in real-world setting with 93.33% accuracy. Our result demonstrated that using a commodity-based smartwatch sensor can yield fall detection results that are competitive with those of custom made expensive sensors