Given the popularity of wrist-worn devices, particularly smartwatches, the identification of manual movement patterns has become of utmost interest within the research field of Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems. In this context, by leveraging the numerous sensors natively embedded in smartwatches, the HAR functionalities that can be implemented in a watch via software and in a very cost-efficient way cover a wide variety of applications, ranging from fitness trackers to gesture detectors aimed at disabled individuals (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTimed Up and Go (TUG) test is one of the most popular clinical tools aimed at the assessment of functional mobility and fall risk in older adults. The automation of the analysis of TUG movements is of great medical interest not only to speed up the test but also to maximize the information inferred from the subjects under study. In this context, this article describes a dataset collected from a cohort of 69 experimental subjects (including 30 adults over 60 years), during the execution of several repetitions of the TUG test.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn recent years, the popularity of wearable devices has fostered the investigation of automatic fall detection systems based on the analysis of the signals captured by transportable inertial sensors. Due to the complexity and variety of human movements, the detection algorithms that offer the best performance when discriminating falls from conventional Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) are those built on machine learning and deep learning mechanisms. In this regard, supervised machine learning binary classification methods have been massively employed by the related literature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOver the last few years, the use of smartwatches in automatic Fall Detection Systems (FDSs) has aroused great interest in the research of new wearable telemonitoring systems for the elderly. In contrast with other approaches to the problem of fall detection, smartwatch-based FDSs can benefit from the widespread acceptance, ergonomics, low cost, networking interfaces, and sensors that these devices provide. However, the scientific literature has shown that, due to the freedom of movement of the arms, the wrist is usually not the most appropriate position to unambiguously characterize the dynamics of the human body during falls, as many conventional activities of daily living that involve a vigorous motion of the hands may be easily misinterpreted as falls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDue to the serious impact of falls on the autonomy and health of older people, the investigation of wearable alerting systems for the automatic detection of falls has gained considerable scientific interest in the field of body telemonitoring with wireless sensors. Because of the difficulties of systematically validating these systems in a real application scenario, Fall Detection Systems (FDSs) are typically evaluated by studying their response to datasets containing inertial sensor measurements captured during the execution of labelled nonfall and fall movements. In this context, during the last decade, numerous publicly accessible databases have been released aiming at offering a common benchmarking tool for the validation of the new proposals on FDSs.
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