Citation

Yang MT, Chuang MW. Sensors (Basel) 2013; 13(12): 16985-17005.

Affiliation

Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering, National Dong-Hwa University, No. 1, Sec. 2, Da-Hsueh Rd., Shoufeng, Hualien 974, Taiwan. mtyang@mail.ndhu.edu.tw.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/s131216985

PMID

24335727

Abstract

Accidental falls are the major cause of serious injuries in toddlers, with most of these falls happening at home. Instead of providing immediate fall detection based on short-term observations, this paper proposes an early-warning childcare system to monitor fall-prone behaviors of toddlers at home. Using 3D human skeleton tracking and floor plane detection based on depth images captured by a Kinect system, eight fall-prone behavioral modules of toddlers are developed and organized according to four essential criteria: posture, motion, balance, and altitude. The final fall risk assessment is generated by a multi-modal fusion using either a weighted mean thresholding or a support vector machine (SVM) classification. Optimizations are performed to determine local parameter in each module and global parameters of the multi-modal fusion. Experimental results show that the proposed system can assess fall risks and trigger alarms with an accuracy rate of 92% at a speed of 20 frames per second.

Language: en