Falling is a serious health risk that can even result in death, especially for the elderly. For this reason, it
is crucial to prevent falls and, in cases where prevention is not possible, to detect and intervene as soon
as possible. Smartwatches are an ideal tool for fall detection due to their constant presence, rich sensor
resources, and communication capabilities. The aim of this study is to detect falls in elderly people with
high accuracy using motion sensor data obtained from smartwatches. To achieve this, a dataset was
created consisting of falls and daily activities. Then, the feature vector was extracted which has
provided successful results in signal processing studies. Afterward, the dimensionality of the dataset
was reduced using an autoencoder-based approach in order to decrease the workload on smartwatches
and ensure more accurate and faster classification. The dataset was classified using machine learning
methods including naive Bayes, logistic regression, and C4.5 decision tree, and successful results were
obtained. Their performances were then compared. It was observed that reducing the dimensionality
had positive effects on both the classification accuracy and the computation time.