No abstract

Fall is a prominent issue due to its severe consequences both physically and mentally. Fall detection and prevention is a critical area of research because it can help elderly people to depend less on caregivers and allow them to live and move more independently. Using electrocardiograms (ECG) signals independently for fall detection and activity classification is a novel approach used in this paper. An algorithm has been proposed which uses pre-trained convolutional neural networks AlexNet and GoogLeNet as a classifier between the fall and no fall scenarios using electrocardiogram signals. The ECGs for both falling and no falling cases were obtained as part of the study using eight volunteers. The signals are pre-processed using an elliptical filter for signal noises such as baseline wander and power-line interface. As feature extractors, frequency-time representations (scalograms) were obtained by applying a continuous wavelet transform on the filtered ECG signals. These scalograms were used as inputs to the neural network and a significant validation accuracy of 98.08% was achieved in the first model. The trained model is able to distinguish ECGs with a fall activity from an ECG with a no fall activity with an accuracy of 98.02%. For the verification of the robustness of the proposed algorithm, our experimental dataset was augmented by adding two different publicly available datasets to it. The second model can classify fall, daily activities and no activities with an accuracy of 98.44%. These models were developed by transfer learning from the domain of real images to the medical images. In comparison to traditional deep learning approaches, the transfer learning not only avoids “reinventing the wheel,” but also presents a lightweight solution to otherwise computationally heavy problems.

Falls can have serious consequences for people, leading to restrictions in mobility or, in the worst case, to traumatic-based cases of death. To provide rapid assistance, a portable fall detection system has been developed that is capable of detecting fall situations and, if necessary, alerting emergency services without any user interaction. The prototype is designed to facilitate reliable fall detection and to classify several fall types and human activities. This solution represents a life-saving service for every person that will significantly improve assistance in the case of fall events, which are a part of daily life. Additionally, this approach facilitates independent system operation, since the system does not depend on sensor or network units located within a building structure. This paper also introduces fall analysis. To guarantee functional safety, a hazard analysis method named system-theoretic accident model and processes (STAMP) is applied.

Utilizing parallel algorithms is an established way of increasing performance in systems that are bound to real-time restrictions. Sensor-based sorting is a machine vision application for which firm real-time requirements need to be respected in order to reliably remove potentially harmful entities from a material feed. Recently, employing a predictive tracking approach using multitarget tracking in order to decrease the error in the physical separation in optical sorting has been proposed. For implementations that use hard associations between measurements and tracks, a linear assignment problem has to be solved for each frame recorded by a camera. The auction algorithm can be utilized for this purpose, which also has the advantage of being well suited for parallel architectures. In this paper, an improved implementation of this algorithm for a graphics processing unit (GPU) is presented. The resulting algorithm is implemented in both an OpenCL and a CUDA based environment. By using an optimized data structure, the presented algorithm outperforms recently proposed implementations in terms of speed while retaining the quality of output of the algorithm. Furthermore, memory requirements are significantly decreased, which is important for embedded systems. Experimental results are provided for two different GPUs and six datasets. It is shown that the proposed approach is of particular interest for applications dealing with comparatively large problem sizes.