Abstract— Falling is a common health problem for elderly. It
is reported that more than one third of adults 65 and older fall
each year in the United States. To address the problem, we are
currently developing an acoustic fall detection system, FADE,
which automatically detects a fall and reports it to the
caregiver. In a previous version, FADE used a 3-microphone
linear array to eliminate the false alarms produced by sounds
produced well above the floor level. To improve the fall
detection in noisy and reverberant environments, we replaced
the linear array by an 8-microphone circular array that can
provide a better 3-D estimation of the sound location.
Preliminary experiments show that the sound location
estimation performed by the circular array is reliable and
robust to interference. We obtained encouraging classification
results on a pilot dataset with 55 falls and 120 non-fall sounds.