Research of Fall Detection and Fall Prevention Technologies: A Systematic Review

Falls are abnormal activity events that occur infrequently; however, they are serious health problems among elderly individuals. With the advancements of technologies, falls have been widely studied by scientific researchers to minimize serious consequences and negative impacts. Fall detection and fall prevention are two strategies to tackle fall issues with a variety of sensing techniques and classifier models. Currently, many reviews on fall-related technologies have been presented and analyzed; however, most of them give surveys on the subfield of fall-related systems, while others are not extensive and comprehensive reviews. In fact, the latest researches have a new trend of fusion-based methods to improve the performance of the fall-related systems based on a combination of different sensors or classifier models. Adaptive threshold and radio frequency-based systems are also researched and proposed recently, which are seldom mentioned in other reviews. Therefore, a global taxonomy for current fall-related studies from four aspects, including current literature reviews, fall detection, and prevention systems based on different sensor apparatus and analytic algorithm, low power techniques, and sensor placements for fall-related systems are conducted in this paper. Several research challenges and issues in the fall-related field are also discussed and analyzed. The objective of this review paper is to conclude and provide a good position of current fall-related studies to inspire researchers in this field.