A fall detection system using low resolution infrared array sensor

Nowadays, aging society is a big problem and demand for monitoring systems is becoming higher. Under this circumstance, a fall is a main factor of accidents at home. From this point of view, we need to detect falls expeditiously and correctly. However, usual methods like using a video camera or a wearable device have some issues in privacy and convenience. In this paper, we propose a system of fall detection using a low resolution infrared array sensor. The proposed system uses this sensor with advantages of privacy protection (low resolution), low cost (cheap sensor), and convenience (small device). We propose four features and based on them, classify activities as either a fall or a non-fall using k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) algorithm. We show a proof-of-concept of our proposed system using a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. Results of experiments show the detection rate of higher than 94 % irrespective of training data contains object's data or not.