With advances in medicine and healthcare systems, the average life expectancy of human beings has increased to more than 80 yrs. As a result, the demographic old‐age dependency ratio (people aged 65 or above relative to those aged 15–64) is expected to increase, by 2060, from ∼28% to ∼50% in the European Union and from ∼33% to ∼45% in Asia (Ageing Report European Economy, 2015). Therefore, the percentage of people who need additional care is also expected to increase. For instance, per studies conducted by the National Program for Health Care of the Elderly (NPHCE), elderly population in India will increase to 12% of the national population by 2025 with 8%–10% requiring utmost care. Geriatric healthcare has gained a lot of prominence in recent years, with specific focus on fall detection systems (FDSs) because of their impact on public lives. According to a World Health Organization report, the frequency of falls increases with increase in age and frailty. Older people living in nursing homes fall more often than those living in the community and 40% of them experience recurrent falls (World Health Organization, 2007). Machine learning (ML) has found its application in geriatric healthcare systems, especially in FDSs. In this paper, we examine the requirements of a typical FDS. Then we present a survey of the recent work in the area of fall detection systems, with focus on the application of machine learning. We also analyze the challenges in FDS systems based on the literature survey.

Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder that affects a large population. This disorder can cause or augment the exposure to cardiovascular dysfunction, stroke, diabetes, and poor productivity. The polysomnography (PSG) test, which is the gold standard for sleep apnea detection, is expensive, inconvenient, and unavailable to the population at large. This calls for more friendly and accessible solutions for diagnosing sleep apnea. In this paper, we examine how sleep apnea is detected clinically, and how a combination of advances in embedded systems and machine learning can help make its diagnosis easier, more affordable, and accessible. We present the relevance of machine learning in sleep apnea detection, and a study of the recent advances in the aforementioned area. The review covers research based on machine learning, deep learning, and sensor fusion, and focuses on the following facets of sleep apnea detection: (i) type of sensors used for data collection, (ii) feature engineering approaches applied on the data (iii) classifiers used for sleep apnea detection/classification. We also analyze the challenges in the design of sleep apnea detection systems, based on the literature survey.