ElderFallGuard: Real-Time IoT and Computer Vision-Based Fall Detection System for Elderly Safety

Abstract: For the elderly population, falls pose a serious and increasing risk of serious injury and loss of independence. In order to overcome this difficulty, we present ElderFallGuard: A Computer Vision Based IoT Solution for Elderly Fall Detection and Notification, a cutting-edge, non-invasive system intended for quick caregiver alerts and real-time fall detection. Our approach leverages the power of computer vision, utilizing MediaPipe for accurate human pose estimation from standard video streams. We developed a custom dataset comprising 7200 samples across 12 distinct human poses to train and evaluate various machine learning classifiers, with Random Forest ultimately selected for its superior performance. ElderFallGuard employs a specific detection logic, identifying a fall when a designated prone pose ("Pose6") is held for over 3 seconds coupled with a significant drop in motion detected for more than 2 seconds. Upon confirmation, the system instantly dispatches an alert, including a snapshot of the event, to a designated Telegram group via a custom bot, incorporating cooldown logic to prevent notification overload. Rigorous testing on our dataset demonstrated exceptional results, achieving 100% accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. ElderFallGuard offers a promising, vision-based IoT solution to enhance elderly safety and provide peace of mind for caregivers through intelligent, timely alerts.