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Multi-modal detection of acute fear of falling in older adults: A proof-of-concept study

2025· article· en· W4416121618 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueOpen Research Europe · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicBalance, Gait, and Falls Prevention
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersHorizon 2020 Framework ProgrammeCanada First Research Excellence Fund
KeywordsRandom forestTransfer of learningFear of fallingLogistic regressionAccelerometerFalling (accident)Wearable computerPsychological intervention

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

<ns3:p>Fear of falling in older adults is generally studied as a chronic condition, yet spikes in acute fear of falling remain underexplored, despite previous research showing that they often precipitate falls. This work introduces a multi-modal sensor-based framework for detecting theoretically defined 'potential fear of falling' by combining gaze elevation and heart rate signals captured from wearable eye tracking and wrist devices in older adults living in the community. We trained five conventional classifiers (logistic regression, KNN, random forest, XGBoost, CatBoost), optimized for minority class F1, and combined two ensembles: (1) random forest + CatBoost + KNN and (2) random forest + logistic regression + KNN. We also applied spectrogram-based transfer learning by fine-tuning the pre-trained VGG16 and ResNet50 models on accelerometer data. In the individual-classifier analysis, XGBoost, KNN, and random forest achieved ROC AUC = 0.99 and minority-class F1 of 0.93, 0.90, and 0.85, respectively. The ensemble models performed better than individual classifiers on multi-modal and accelerometer-only inputs, though overall performance remained modest without multi-modal signals in the latter case (minority-class F1 = 0.39). Transfer models outperformed ensembles. These results demonstrate that ensemble and spectrogram-based transfer learning models provide robust, high-sensitivity detection of potential acute fear of falling in multi-modal signals. This work lays the foundation for future studies to explore acute fear of falling biomarkers in larger cohorts and paves the way for personalized fall prevention interventions in everyday settings.</ns3:p>

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Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.656
Threshold uncertainty score0.477

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.090
GPT teacher head0.480
Teacher spread0.390 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it