Artificial Intelligence for Elderly Fall Detection: State-of-the-art Methods, Applications and Challenges

Accidental falls have emerged as a major public health concern, especially among individuals aged 65 and older, due to their high incidence and severe consequences. Without timely intervention, such falls can result in fractures, traumatic brain injuries, and long-term complications. As a result, considerable research has focused on developing automated fall detection systems that integrate intelligent algorithms with sensor-based data acquisition to enable rapid response and medical assistance. This study follows the PRISMA framework to conduct a systematic literature review. A comprehensive search was performed across major databases including PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, and IEEE Xplore using fall detection–related keywords. From an initial pool of 596 articles, duplicates were removed and strict inclusion/exclusion criteria were applied, resulting in 182 relevant articles for in-depth analysis. This review examines a wide range of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) approaches applied to fall detection using diverse sensor modalities, including wearable, vision-based, ambient, and multimodal systems. Additionally, it summarizes the publicly available datasets and sensor configurations used in existing studies. This broad perspective is essential to compare trade-offs across sensing modalities and support effective system development for real-world deployment. This review provides a comparative overview of AI/ML-based fall detection approaches, highlighting differences in accuracy, sensitivity, and dataset usage as reported in existing literature. In the end, many open research challenges in using AI and ML to detect falls are outlined, along with potential future perspectives.