Citation

Guvensan MA, Kansiz AO, Camgoz NC, Turkmen HI, Yavuz AG, Karsligil ME. Sensors (Basel) 2017; 17(7): s17071487.

Affiliation

Department of Computer Engineering, Yildiz Technical University, 34220 Istanbul, Turkey. elif@ce.yildiz.edu.tr.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/s17071487

PMID

28644378

Abstract

Automatic detection of fall events is vital to providing fast medical assistance to the causality, particularly when the injury causes loss of consciousness. Optimization of the energy consumption of mobile applications, especially those which run 24/7 in the background, is essential for longer use of smartphones. In order to improve energy-efficiency without compromising on the fall detection performance, we propose a novel 3-tier architecture that combines simple thresholding methods with machine learning algorithms. The proposed method is implemented on a mobile application, called uSurvive, for Android smartphones. It runs as a background service and monitors the activities of a person in daily life and automatically sends a notification to the appropriate authorities and/or user defined contacts when it detects a fall. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated in terms of fall detection performance and energy consumption. Real life performance tests conducted on two different models of smartphone demonstrate that our 3-tier architecture with feature reduction could save up to 62% of energy compared to machine learning only solutions. In addition to this energy saving, the hybrid method has a 93% of accuracy, which is superior to thresholding methods and better than machine learning only solutions.

Language: en

Keywords

activity classification; energy efficient smartphone application; fall detection; machine learning; multi-tier architecture; simple thresholding