Authors:
Mattia Bertschi
and
Leopoldo Rossini
Affiliation:
Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology, Switzerland
Keyword(s):
Elderly, Monitoring, Portable device, Wearable device, Automatic fall detection, Accelerometers.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Biomedical Equipment
;
Biomedical Instruments and Devices
;
Devices
;
Embedded Signal Processing
;
Health Monitoring Devices
;
Human-Computer Interaction
;
Physiological Computing Systems
Abstract:
Falls are the most important cause of accidents for elderly people and often result in serious physical and psychological consequences. The rapid growth of the elderly population increases the magnitude of the problem as well as the generated costs. In order to take care of old people living by themselves or in care centres and to reduce the consequences of a fall, various technological solutions have been studied, however none led to a commercial product fulfilling user requirements. In this work we present an automatic fall detector in the form of a wrist watch which could lead to better life conditions for the elderly. Our device implements functionalities such as wireless communication, automatic fall detection, manual alarm triggering, data storage, and simple user interface. Even though the wrist is probably the most difficult measurement location on the body to discern a fall event, the proposed detection algorithm shows encouraging results (90% sensitivity, 97% specificity) w
ith the signals of our database.
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