RAReFall — Real-time activity recognition and fall detection system

This demo paper presents the RAReFall system, which is a real-time activity recognition and fall detection system. It is tuned for robustness and real-time performance by combining human-understandable rules and classifiers trained with machine learning algorithms. The system consists of two wearable accelerometers sewn into elastic sports-wear, placed on the abdomen and the right thigh. The recognition of the user´s activities and detection of falls is performed on a laptop using the raw sensors´ data acquired through Bluetooth. The offline evaluation of the system´s performance was conducted on a dataset containing a wide range of activities and different types of falls. The F-measure of the activity recognition and fall detection were 99% and 78%, respectively. Additionally, the system was evaluated at the EvAAL-2013 activity recognition competition and awarded the first place, achieving the score of 83.6%, which was for 14.2 percentage points better than the second-place system. The evaluation was performed in a living lab using several criteria: recognition performance, user-acceptance, recognition delay, system installation complexity and interoperability with other systems.