Floor Pressure Imaging for Fall Detection with Fiber-Optic Sensors

Falls are a major health risk for the elderly, decreasing their ability to live independently. This article proposes a novel feature-specific floor pressure imaging system that uses a smart floor embedded with fiber sensors. The potential applications include indoor human-activity analysis for intelligent surveillance. In particular, the authors focus on the application of fall detection in a bathroom scenario. Their fall detection method consists of two steps: floor pressure imaging for target posture classification and the fall event decision based on the classified target postures. Fall detection experiments validated the proposed method. This article is part of a special issue on domestic pervasive computing. © 2016 IEEE.