NEWS ARTICLE
学术动态：Efficient Fall Detection from Wrist-Worn IMU Signals via Knowledge Distillation: A Lightweight CNN Approach Using .
论文标题：Efficient Fall Detection from Wrist-Worn IMU Signals via Knowledge Distillation: A Lightweight CNN Approach Using the UMAFall Dataset
发布日期：2026-05-24
作者：Ali Taheri, Mina Salehi, Jeong Ho Kim
DOI：10.3390/s26113328
论文摘要：Falls are a major contributor to morbidity and mortality among older adults, and timely fall detection can help reduce the severity of fall-related outcomes. Wearable inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors offer a promising solution for fall detection; however, many existing approaches rely on multiple sensing locations and computationally intensive models, which can limit their practicality for resource-constrained wearable devices. This study proposes a knowledge distillation framework for efficient wrist-based fall detection using the publicly available University of Málaga fall detection dataset (UMAFall), a benchmark dataset for human activity recognition and fall detection. Although UMAFall was not collected from older adults, it provides a useful public benchmark for evaluating IMU-based fall detection methods. Knowledge distillation was implemented using a teacher–student framework, in which a high-capacity teacher model trained with IMU data from four body locations (waist, wrist, ankle, and chest) provided soft targets for guiding a compact wrist-only CNN student model. In a held-out test evaluation using Subjects 2 and 5, the teacher model achieved 97.6% accuracy and an F1 score of 96.7%, with approximately 1.3 million trainable parameters. The independently trained wrist-based CNN achieved 90.2% accuracy and an F1 score of 87.1%. After applying knowledge distillation, the student model improved to 95.1% accuracy and an F1 score of 93.3% while maintaining the same lightweight architecture. A supplementary leave-one-subject-out analysis showed slightly higher and more stable AUC for KD-CNN than the independently trained CNN (0.96 ± 0.03 vs. 0.94 ± 0.07). These findings suggest that knowledge distillation can improve wrist-only fall detection in this feasibility evaluation, but further validation using older adults and real-world smartwatch data is needed.
元数据：Crossref 收录的 MDPI Sensors 论文。 DOI: 10.3390/s26113328. Vol. 26, Issue 11. Authors: Ali Taheri, Mina Salehi, Jeong Ho Kim.
开放许可：https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
原文链接：https://doi.org/10.3390/s26113328
PDF 链接：https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/26/11/3328/pdf