Range information for reducing fall false alarms in assisted living

Fall detection using radar technology is emerging to be an area of significance research and development. The main challenges remain in reducing false alarms to a level that is acceptable to healthcare providers and retirement homes. One source of false alarms is the confusion of actual falls and fall-like gross-motor activities, such as sitting. Discriminative features based on only Doppler frequency may declare fast sitting as a slow fall. However, sittings, unlike falls, have limited range extent which can be easily revealed by using a range-Doppler radar, in lieu of continuous wave (CW) radar. Using experimental data from two different ultra-wideband (UWB) radars operating different carrier frequencies as well as data from Kinect-based UWB pulse-Doppler radar simulator, this paper demonstrates reductions in fall false alarm rates exploiting the range information compared to Doppler only processing.