mHealth based ubiquitous fall detection for elderly people

Fall related injuries are a major cause of severe health damage and immobility in elderly population. Often the treatment of fall associated injuries is delayed due to long lie periods after fall because of absence or delayed acknowledgement of fall incident. This leads to large treatment costs and further long-term care and monitoring costs. Hence there is a need of an automated, low-cost and small size ubiquitous fall detection system such that fall incidents can be acknowledged in time and the elderly person can get immediate medical treatment. This paper explains the design of an accelerometer-based prototype for fall-detection for elderly people in both indoors and outdoors environment to be worn on waist as a belt. The designed system consists of mbed LPC11U24 as the main processing unit and sensing unit consisting of accelerometer, gyroscope, temperature sensor, pressure sensor and heart beat sensor. This prototype makes use of smart phones which have become widely acceptable and highly capable over a short duration. The measured sensor values are transferred to designed mobile app and further to a remote sensor for continuously monitoring the elderly person. The system has the capability of generating alarm and informing the healthcare provider and relatives or friends in emergency situations. To validate the developed fall detection system, it has been tested by intentional falls in laboratory environment.