ElderFallGuard: Real-Time IoT and Computer Vision-Based Fall Detection System for Elderly Safety

For the elderly population, falls pose a serious and increasing risk of serious injury and loss of independence. In order to overcome this difficulty, we present ElderFallGuard: A Computer Vision Based IoT Solution for Elderly Fall Detection and Notification, a cutting-edge, non-invasive system intended for quick caregiver alerts and real-time fall detection. Our approach leverages the power of computer vision, utilizing MediaPipe for accurate human pose estimation from standard video streams. We developed a custom dataset comprising 7200 samples across 12 distinct human poses to train and evaluate various machine learning classifiers, with Random Forest ultimately selected for its superior performance. ElderFallGuard employs a specific detection logic, identifying a fall when a designated prone pose ("Pose6") is held for over 3 seconds coupled with a significant drop in motion detected for more than 2 seconds. Upon confirmation, the system instantly dispatches an alert, including a snapshot of the event, to a designated Telegram group via a custom bot, incorporating cooldown logic to prevent notification overload. Rigorous testing on our dataset demonstrated exceptional results, achieving 100% accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. ElderFallGuard offers a promising, vision-based IoT solution to enhance elderly safety and provide peace of mind for caregivers through intelligent, timely alerts.

Case Study: Fine-tuning Small Language Models for Accurate and Private CWE Detection in Python Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities in understanding and analyzing code for security vulnerabilities, such as Common Weakness Enumerations (CWEs). However, their reliance on cloud infrastructure and substantial computational requirements pose challenges for analyzing sensitive or proprietary codebases due to privacy concerns and inference costs. This work explores the potential of Small Language Models (SLMs) as a viable alternative for accurate, on-premise vulnerability detection. We investigated whether a 350-million parameter pre-trained code model (codegen-mono) could be effectively fine-tuned to detect the MITRE Top 25 CWEs specifically within Python code. To facilitate this, we developed a targeted dataset of 500 examples using a semi-supervised approach involving LLM-driven synthetic data generation coupled with meticulous human review. Initial tests confirmed that the base codegen-mono model completely failed to identify CWEs in our samples. However, after applying instruction-following fine-tuning, the specialized SLM achieved remarkable performance on our test set, yielding approximately 99% accuracy, 98.08% precision, 100% recall, and a 99.04% F1-score. These results strongly suggest that fine-tuned SLMs can serve as highly accurate and efficient tools for CWE detection, offering a practical and privacy-preserving solution for integrating advanced security analysis directly into development workflows.