XFall: Domain Adaptive Wi-Fi-Based Fall Detection With Cross-Modal Supervision

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an increasing demand for human fall detection systems. Among all existing methods, Wi-Fi-based fall detection has become one of the most promising solutions due to its pervasiveness. However, when applied to a new domain, existing Wi-Fi-based solutions suffer from severe performance degradation caused by low generalizability. In this paper, we propose XFall, a domain-adaptive fall detection system based on Wi-Fi. XFall overcomes the generalization problem from three aspects. To advance cross-environment sensing, XFall exploits an environment-independent feature called speed distribution profile, which is irrelevant to indoor layout and device deployment. To ensure sensitivity across all fall types, an attention-based encoder is designed to extract the general fall representation by associating both the spatial and temporal dimensions of the input. To train a large model with limited amounts of Wi-Fi data, we design a cross-modal learning framework, adopting a pre-trained visual model for supervision during the training process. We implement and evaluate XFall on one of the latest commercial wireless products through a year-long deployment in real-world settings. The result shows XFall achieves an overall accuracy of 96.8%, with a miss alarm rate of 3.1% and a false alarm rate of 3.3%, outperforming the state-of-the-art solutions in both in-domain and cross-domain evaluation.