Fall is a major problem leading to serious injuries in geriatric populations. Sensor-based fall risk assessment is one of the emerging technologies to identify people with high fall risk by sensors, so as to implement fall prevention measures. Research on this domain has recently made great progress, attracting the growing attention of researchers from medicine and engineering. However, there is a lack of studies on this topic which elaborate the state of the art. This paper presents a comprehensive survey to discuss the development and current status of various aspects of sensor-based fall risk assessment. Firstly, we present the principles of fall risk assessment. Secondly, we show knowledge of fall risk monitoring techniques, including wearable sensor based and non-wearable sensor based. After that we discuss features which are extracted from sensors in fall risk assessment. Then we review the major methods of fall risk modeling and assessment. We also discuss some challenges and promising directions in this field at last.
Keywords: fall prediction; fall risk assessment; gait monitoring; sensor.