A Framework for Daily Activity Monitoring and Fall Detection Based on Surface Electromyography and Accelerometer Signals

As an essential branch of context awareness, activity awareness, especially daily activity monitoring and fall detection, is important to healthcare for the elderly and patients with chronic diseases. In this paper, a framework for activity awareness using surface electromyography and accelerometer (ACC) signals is proposed. First, histogram negative entropy was employed to determine the start- and end-points of static and dynamic active segments. Then, the angle of each ACC axis was calculated to indicate body postures, which assisted with sorting dynamic activities into two categories: dynamic gait activities and dynamic transition ones, by judging whether the pre- and post-postures are both standing. Next, the dynamic gait activities were identified by the double-stream hidden Markov models. Besides, the dynamic transition activities were distinguished into normal transition activities and falls by resultant ACC amplitude. Finally, a continuous daily activity monitoring and fall detection scheme was performed with the recognition accuracy over 98%, demonstrating the excellent fall detection performance and the great feasibility of the proposed method in daily activities awareness.