Fall detection in older adults with mobile IoT devices and machine learning in the cloud and on the edge

Abstract Remote monitoring of older adults and detecting dangers in the state of human health have become essential elements of modern telemedicine. Falls are a frequent reason for deaths or post-traumatic complications in the elderly. Therefore, the early detection of falls can be crucial for the survival of a person or for providing necessary support. However, telemedicine data centers require scalable computing and storage resources for the growing number of monitored people. Dedicated approaches that allow for minimal data transmission of strictly interesting cases are also required. In this paper, we show a scalable architecture of a system that can monitor thousands of older adults, detect falls, and notify caregivers. Scalability tests that disclose requirements to enable large scale system operations were also performed. Moreover, we validated several Machine Learning models to evaluate their suitability in the detection process. Among the tested models, Boosted Decisions Trees resulted in the best classification performance. We also experimentally tested the detection of falls inside a Cloud-based data center and on an Edge IoT device. Results of tests on the device-to-cloud data transmission confirmed that significant reduction in the size of stored and transmitted data can be achieved while performing fall detection on the Edge.