You Don't Need Attention: Gated Convolutional Modeling for Watch-Based 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.

Personalized Fall Detection by Balancing Data with Selective Feedback Using Contrastive Learning

Personalized fall detection models can significantly improve accuracy by adapting to individual motion patterns, yet their effectiveness is often limited by the scarcity of real-world fall data and the dominance of non-fall feedback samples. This imbalance biases the model toward routine activities and weakens its sensitivity to true fall events. To address this challenge, we propose a personalization framework that combines semi-supervised clustering with contrastive learning to identify and balance the most informative user feedback samples. The framework is evaluated under three retraining strategies, including Training from Scratch (TFS), Transfer Learning (TL), and Few-Shot Learning (FSL), to assess adaptability across learning paradigms. Real-time experiments with ten participants show that the TFS approach achieves the highest performance, with up to a 25% improvement over the baseline, while FSL achieves the second-highest performance with a 7% improvement, demonstrating the effectiveness of selective personalization for real-world deployment.