A Novel Approach for Activity, Fall and Gait Detection Using Multiple 2D LiDARs

A key concept in health monitoring systems for elderly people is the continuous and non-intrusive detection of their activities to identify when hazardous events such as sudden falling occur/are about to occur. The existence of obstacles in the environment largely limits the detection performance of existing approaches of activity detection relying on non-contact sensors. A simple, yet effective, approach to address this issue is the use of multiple sensors which collaborate with one another. In this paper, we propose an approach that relies on 2D Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology for activity detection. We employ multiple 2D LiDARs placed at different locations in a single room with difference obstacles (e.g., furniture) and working in coordination to construct a fuller representation of the activities being performed. Our approach transforms the concatenation of the different LiDAR data into a more comprehensible data format (i.e., images). The generated images are then processed using a Convolutional LSTM Neural Network to perform the classification. For 3 different tasks, namely activity detection, fall detection, and unsteady gate detection, our proposed approach reaches an accuracy equal to 96.10%, 99.13% and 93.13%, respectively.