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

arXiv:2610.18260v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wearable fall detection is hampered by rare fall events, scarce labeled IMU data, and the cost of training deep models on large, imbalanced corpora. Existing methods either rely on hand-crafted features with shallow classifiers, which limits learning from raw signals, or train deep networks on full datasets that require re-sampling to counter class skew and demand substantial data and compute. To address this, we propose a novel Fall detection framework via Normalized-gradient and Embedding matched Synthetic Time-frequency condensation, dubbed FALLNEST, a data-centric approach that distills large, imbalanced IMU datasets into tiny, class-balanced synthetic training sets. Building on dual-domain time-series condensation (CondTSC), FALLNEST introduces a fall-specific 7-channel input with accelerometer vector magnitude, class-balanced K-Means initialization, and normalized gradient matching with gradient clipping, combined with MMD-based embedding alignment and multi-view Fourier-domain augmentation, so that class balance arises from the condensed set itself rather than from re-sampling. We evaluate on SisFall, KFall, and MobiFall using strict subject-wise splits and naturally imbalanced test sets, reporting accuracy, Macro-F1, and PR-AUC over five seeds. A 102K-parameter TinyCNN trained on only 32 to 146 synthetic windows (about only 1% of the training windows) reaches 93.5-95.8% mean accuracy and 0.89-0.98 PR-AUC, with standard deviations of 1.0-1.7% in accuracy, demonstrating the efficacy of our approach.

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Source: arXiv cs.CV | 2026-10-14