# Deep Learning for Computer Vision based Activity Recognition and Fall Detection of the Elderly: a Systematic Review

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11790 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11790/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 296 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1259/) (2014)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02808/) (2016)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04757/) (2019)
- [PointRend: Image Segmentation as Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08193/) (2019)
- [RMPE: Regional Multi-person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00137/) (2016)
- [A Short Note about Kinetics-600](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01340/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13586/) (2021)
- [AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03375/) (2022)
- [Visual Semantic Role Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04474/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [SETransformer: A Hybrid Attention-Based Architecture for Robust Human Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19369/) (2025)
- [Watch Your Step: A Cost-Sensitive Framework for Accelerometer-Based Fall Detection in Real-World Streaming Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11789/) (2025)
- [A Lightweight 3D-CNN for Event-Based Human Action Recognition with Privacy-Preserving Potential](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03665/) (2025)
- [Multi-Head Adaptive Graph Convolution Network for Sparse Point Cloud-Based Human Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02778/) (2025)
- [OptiGait-LGBM: An Efficient Approach of Gait-based Person Re-identification in Non-Overlapping Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08801/) (2025)
- [Summary of the Unusual Activity Recognition Challenge for Developmental Disability Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17049/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As the percentage of elderly people in developed countries increases worldwide, the healthcare of this collective is a worrying matter, especially if it includes the preservation of their autonomy. In this direction, many studies are being published on Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems, which help to reduce the preoccupations raised by the independent living of the elderly. In this study, a systematic review of the literature is presented on fall detection and Human Activity Recognition (HAR) for the elderly, as the two main tasks to solve to guarantee the safety of elderly people living alone. To address the current tendency to perform these two tasks, the review focuses on the use of Deep Learning (DL) based approaches on computer vision data. In addition, different collections of data like DL models, datasets or hardware (e.g. depth or thermal cameras) are gathered from the reviewed studies and provided for reference in future studies. Strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches are also discussed and, based on them, our recommendations for future works are provided.