Application of Pose Estimation on Webcam for Fall Risk Assessment

Fall risk assessment is an effective and simple measure to evaluate the balance of people especially the elderly who are likely to have balance disorder. Lose of body balance increases a fall risk which could lead to severe damage to aging persons. In this paper, we propose to apply pose estimation technique based on PoseNet method to detect body joints from webcam's video for two types of fall risk assessment: Five Times Sit to Stand Test (FTSTS) and 30-Second Chair Stand Test (30CST). The experiments were performed with 17 volunteers concurrently with the measures of a healthcare expert. The results revealed that our proposed technique corresponds well with the measure of the expert evaluating by a Pearson correlation coefficient which equals to 0.903 and 0.980 for FTSTS and 30CST respectively.