Edge-AI in LoRa-based Health Monitoring: Fall Detection System with Fog Computing and LSTM Recurrent Neural Networks

Remote healthcare monitoring has exponentially grown over the past decade together with the increasing penetration of Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. IoT-based health systems help to improve the quality of healthcare services through real-time data acquisition and processing. However, traditional IoT architectures have some limitations. For instance, they cannot properly function in areas with poor or unstable Internet. Low power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies, including long-range communication protocols such as LoRa, are a potential candidate to overcome the lacking network infrastructure. Nevertheless, LPWANs have limited transmission bandwidth not suitable for high data rate applications such as fall detection systems or electrocardiography monitoring. Therefore, data processing and compression are required at the edge of the network. We propose a system architecture with integrated artificial intelligence that combines Edge and Fog computing, LPWAN technology, IoT and deep learning algorithms to perform health monitoring tasks. In particular, we demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of this architecture via a use case of fall detection using recurrent neural networks. We have implemented a fall detection system from the sensor node and Edge gateway to cloud services and end-user applications. The system uses inertial data as input and achieves an average precision of over 90% and an average recall over 95% in fall detection.