Advanced computer vision technology can provide near real-time home
monitoring to support "aging in place" by detecting falls and symptoms related
to seizures and stroke. Affordable webcams, together with cloud computing
services (to run machine learning algorithms), can potentially bring
significant social benefits. However, it has not been deployed in practice
because of privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a strategy that uses
homomorphic encryption to resolve this dilemma, which guarantees information
confidentiality while retaining action detection. Our protocol for secure
inference can distinguish falls from activities of daily living with 86.21%
sensitivity and 99.14% specificity, with an average inference latency of 1.2
seconds and 2.4 seconds on real-world test datasets using small and large
neural nets, respectively. We show that our method enables a 613x speedup over
the latency-optimized LoLa and achieves an average of 3.1x throughput increase
in secure inference compared to the throughput-optimized nGraph-HE2.