Due to the frailty of elderly individuals' physical condition, falling can lead to severe bodily injuries. Effective fall detection can significantly reduce the occurrence of such incidents. However, current fall detection methods heavily rely on visual and multi-sensor devices, which incur higher costs and complex wearable designs, limiting their wide-ranging applicability. In this paper, we propose a fall detection method based on nursing aids integrated with multi-array flexible tactile sensors. We design a kind of multi-array capacitive tactile sensor and arrange the distribution of tactile sensors on the foot based on plantar force analysis and measure tactile sequences from the sole of the foot to develop a dataset. Then we construct a fall detection model based on a graph convolution neural network and long-short term memory network (GCN-LSTM), where the GCN module and LSTM module separately extract spatial and temporal features from the tactile sequences, achieving detection on tactile data of foot and walking states for specific time series in the future. Experiments are carried out with the fall detection model, the Mean Squared Error (MSE) of the predicted tactile data of the foot at the next time step is 0.0716, with the fall detection accuracy of 96.36%. What is more, the model can achieve fall detection on 5-time steps with 0.2-s intervals in the future with high confidence results. It exhibits outstanding performance, surpassing other baseline algorithms. Besides, we conduct experiments on different ground types and ground morphologies for fall detection, and the model showcases robust generalization capabilities.
Keywords: elderly fall detection; multi-array flexible tactile sensor; multi-task learning; nursing aids; tactile sequences.