Fall risk assessment and early-warning for toddler behaviors at home

Sensors (Basel). 2013 Dec 10;13(12):16985-7005. doi: 10.3390/s131216985.

Abstract

Accidental falls are the major cause of serious injuries in toddlers, with most of these falls happening at home. Instead of providing immediate fall detection based on short-term observations, this paper proposes an early-warning childcare system to monitor fall-prone behaviors of toddlers at home. Using 3D human skeleton tracking and floor plane detection based on depth images captured by a Kinect system, eight fall-prone behavioral modules of toddlers are developed and organized according to four essential criteria: posture, motion, balance, and altitude. The final fall risk assessment is generated by a multi-modal fusion using either a weighted mean thresholding or a support vector machine (SVM) classification. Optimizations are performed to determine local parameter in each module and global parameters of the multi-modal fusion. Experimental results show that the proposed system can assess fall risks and trigger alarms with an accuracy rate of 92% at a speed of 20 frames per second.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Accidental Falls / prevention & control*
  • Child Care / methods*
  • Child, Preschool
  • Humans
  • Monitoring, Physiologic / instrumentation*
  • Monitoring, Physiologic / methods*
  • Postural Balance / physiology
  • Posture / physiology
  • Risk Assessment
  • Support Vector Machine