FALLNEST: Dual-Domain Dataset Condensation of Imbalanced IMU Data for Wearable Fall Detection

Existing deep learning approaches for wearable fall detection systems rely on self-attention mechanisms that impose quadratic computational overhead, distributing weights across all time steps. This global weight distribution impairs the precise localization of the brief impact signatures that characterize falls within short, fixed-length windows. To overcome this challenge, we propose Gated-CNN, a lightweight dual-stream architecture that processes accelerometer and gyroscope streams through independent one-dimensional convolutional feature extractors, followed by (i) a sigmoid gating module that selectively suppresses uninformative background activations while amplifying fall-discriminative features, (ii) a global average pooling layer that compresses each stream into a compact fixed-length descriptor, and (iii) a shared classification head that fuses both descriptors for binary fall prediction. For offline evaluation, we evaluate the model across five wrist-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) datasets, achieving average F1-scores of 93%, 93%, 90%, 91%, and 90% on SmartFallMM, WEDA-Fall, FallAllD, UMAFall, and UP-Fall, outperforming Transformer baselines. For real-time evaluation, we deployed the model on a Google Pixel Watch 3 and tested across 12 participants. The model achieves an average F1-score of 97% and an accuracy of 98% with zero missed falls, showing that sigmoid gating offers a more structurally aligned and computationally efficient alternative to attention for commodity smartwatch-based fall detection.

Falls are a major health concern for older adults, and wearable sensors have been widely explored for detecting falls and enabling timely intervention. However, real-world falls are extremely rare: collecting 100 of them requires an estimated 100,000 days of monitoring, resulting in severely limited labelled data for training machine learning models. Consequently, many approaches rely on simulated datasets, often reporting high laboratory performance but limited real-world generalisation. We present a systematic evaluation of motion representations for wearable fall detection under real-world data scarcity. Using accelerometer signals, we compare interval-based, kernel-based, symbolic, and foundation model representations. As an interpretable baseline, we additionally investigate a lightweight symbolic representation that converts short motion segments into symbolic sentences augmented with physically-grounded impact descriptors. Experiments use FallAllD, a simulated falls dataset, and FARSEEING, a clinically verified real-world falls dataset. Through cross-validation, controlled data scarcity, and cross-dataset transfer, we examine how representation choices affect robustness under realistic deployment. Our results reveal that highly parameterised kernel and foundation models excel on simulated data but degrade severely under both data scarcity and domain shift. Although the interval-based representation achieves the strongest absolute real-world performance, augmenting a symbolic representation with physically-grounded impact descriptors yields the smallest degradation under domain shift and retains detection sensitivity under extreme scarcity, albeit at lower precision. These findings highlight the importance of evaluating beyond simulated benchmarks and show that representation choice is critical for deployable fall detection given the scarcity of real-world data.

Visual fall detection models are usually trained on small, staged datasets. Their real-world utility remains unclear; such data lacks diversity and evaluation protocols differ from paper to paper. We propose OmniFall, a unified benchmark of 15k videos (80 hours) with frame-level annotations in a single 16-class taxonomy. It spans three domains: OF-Staged unifies eight staged datasets with cross-subject and cross-view splits; OF-Synthetic adds 12k videos (17 h) with controlled demographic and environmental diversity; and OF-In-the-Wild provides a test-only set of genuine accident videos. We evaluate fine-tuned models as well as much larger zero-shot multimodal LLMs. On in-the-wild fall events, both do comparably well. The clinically critical fallen state is where they part: zero-shot models keep confusing fallen with lying, whereas models fine-tuned on synthetic data with explicit fallen-state scenes do substantially better. We release the unified annotations, the synthetic data, and the in-the-wild test set to foster the development of fall and fallen-state detectors for uncontrolled environments. Dataset: https://hf.co/datasets/simplexsigil2/omnifall