P2MFDS: A Privacy-Preserving Multimodal Fall Detection System for Elderly People in Bathroom Environments

By 2050, people aged 65 and over are projected to make up 16% of the global population. As aging is closely associated with increased fall risk, particularly in wet and confined environments such as bathrooms where over 80% of falls occur. Although recent research has increasingly focused on non-intrusive, privacy-preserving approaches that do not rely on wearable devices or video-based monitoring, these efforts have not fully overcome the limitations of existing unimodal systems (e.g., WiFi-, infrared-, or mmWave-based), which are prone to reduced accuracy in complex environments. These limitations stem from fundamental constraints in unimodal sensing, including system bias and environmental interference, such as multipath fading in WiFi-based systems and drastic temperature changes in infrared-based methods. To address these challenges, we propose a Privacy-Preserving Multimodal Fall Detection System for Elderly People in Bathroom Environments. First, we develop a sensor evaluation framework to select and fuse millimeter-wave radar with 3D vibration sensing, and use it to construct and preprocess a large-scale, privacy-preserving multimodal dataset in real bathroom settings, which will be released upon publication. Second, we introduce P2MFDS, a dual-stream network combining a CNN-BiLSTM-Attention branch for radar motion dynamics with a multi-scale CNN-SEBlock-Self-Attention branch for vibration impact detection. By uniting macro- and micro-scale features, P2MFDS delivers significant gains in accuracy and recall over state-of-the-art approaches.