A VAE-Based Data Augmentation Method for Fall Detection System using Wearable Sensor

Fall incidents among the elderly represent a significant global concern, often resulting in physical injuries and psychological distress. It is crucial to develop reliable fall detection systems which are capable of identifying fall events immediately and triggering alerts for assistance. However, real-world fall occurrences are infrequent, leading to a highly imbalanced class situation. Training a model with imbalanced datasets may result in biased models with poor performance in fall detection. To address this challenge, various techniques such as data transformation and Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) have been proposed. However, these methods are constrained by issues such as limitations in input data size or sensitivity to outliers. Compared to other methods, variational autoencoder (VAE) can generate data with a similar probability distribution to the original input data while constraining the latent representation in a Gaussian distribution. This study proposes a VAE-based data augmentation method for wearable-based fall detection system. The proposed method is validated on the FallAllD public dataset, achieving a F-score of 99.46%. The performance has been increased by 2.21%. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of VAE-based data augmentation technique in enhancing fall detection systems and its superior performance compared with other traditional data augmentation methods.