CNN-Based Self-Attention Weight Extraction for Fall Event Prediction Using Balance Test Score

Injury, hospitalization, and even death are common consequences of falling for elderly people. Therefore, early and robust identification of people at risk of recurrent falling is crucial from a preventive point of view. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of an interpretable semi-supervised approach in identifying individuals at risk of falls by using the data provided by ankle-mounted IMU sensors. Our method benefits from the cause–effect link between a fall event and balance ability to pinpoint the moments with the highest fall probability. This framework also has the advantage of training on unlabeled data, and one can exploit its interpretation capacities to detect the target while only using patient metadata, especially those in relation to balance characteristics. This study shows that a visual-based self-attention model is able to infer the relationship between a fall event and loss of balance by attributing high values of weight to moments where the vertical acceleration component of the IMU sensors exceeds 5 m/s² during an especially short period. This semi-supervised approach uses interpretable features to highlight the moments of the recording that may explain the score of balance, thus revealing the moments with the highest risk of falling. Our model allows for the detection of 71% of the possible falling risk events in a window of 1 s (500 ms before and after the target) when compared with threshold-based approaches. This type of framework plays a paramount role in reducing the costs of annotation in the case of fall prevention when using wearable devices. Overall, this adaptive tool can provide valuable data to healthcare professionals, and it can assist them in enhancing fall prevention efforts on a larger scale with lower costs.