Senior citizens are prone to accidents due to their old age. The accidents may cause severe injuries and even to death if it is not identified and treated within a short period of time. Also, it is more risk if they stay alone in their homes. To mitigate the risk, an alert system is to be designed to alert the caretaker about the occurrence of the accident. By mounting three aerial microphones and one-floor acoustic sensor (FAS) in their room and monitoring the acoustic information received from the microphone and FAS, the acoustic information of the fall event is recorded. The acoustic features such as energy, spectral centroid, spectral flux, zero-crossing rate and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) are extracted from the acoustic signal. Support vector machine (SVM) network and deep learning neural networks (DNN) with more than two hidden layers are trained with a reduced set of features obtained with principal component analysis (PCA) from the acoustic features. DNN classifier is proved to be better than SVM classifier. The obtained accuracy for DNN is 97%, the accuracy of the SVM classifier with MLP kernel and RBF kernel is 50% and 83%, respectively. © 2021, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.