An enhanced fall detection system for elderly person monitoring using consumer home networks

Various fall-detection solutions have been previously proposed to create a reliable surveillance system for elderly people with high requirements on accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. In this paper, an enhanced fall detection system is proposed for elderly person monitoring that is based on smart sensors worn on the body and operating through consumer home networks. With treble thresholds, accidental falls can be detected in the home healthcare environment. By utilizing information gathered from an accelerometer, cardiotachometer and smart sensors, the impacts of falls can be logged and distinguished from normal daily activities. The proposed system has been deployed in a prototype system as detailed in this paper. From a test group of 30 healthy participants, it was found that the proposed fall detection system can achieve a high detection accuracy of 97.5%, while the sensitivity and specificity are 96.8% and 98.1% respectively. Therefore, this system can reliably be developed and deployed into a consumer product for use as an elderly person monitoring device with high accuracy and a low false positive rate

Dictionary memory based software architecture for distributed bluetooth low energy host controllers enabling high coverage in consumer residential healthcare environments

Technology has been seen as a possible solution to the increasing costs of healthcare and the globally aging population. It is known that many elderly people prefer to stay in their homes for as long as possible and remote monitoring can be a solution, but often such systems lack useful information or are prohibitive due to cost, ease of use/deployment and wireless coverage. This work presents a novel gateway software architecture based on threads being managed by dictionary memory. The architecture has been deployed in a distributed interconnected set of low-cost consumer grade gateway devices using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) that are positioned around the home. The gateway devices can then be used to listen, monitor or connect to BLE based healthcare sensors to continually reveal information about the user with full residential coverage. A further novelty of this work is the ability to maintain handover connections between many sensors and many gateways as a user moves throughout their home, thus the gateways can route information to/from sensors across the consumer’s home network. The system has been tested in an experimental house and is now poised to be initially deployed to 100 homes for residential healthcare monitoring before any public mass consumer deployment

An Enhanced fall detection system with GSM and GPS Technology

Fall-related accident and injury are a standout among the most widely recognized motivations to reason for death and hospitalization among elderly. Falls among older people become a major problem facing hospitals and nursing homes. An enhanced fall detection system is proposed for elderly person monitoring that is based on-body sensor. Various fall-detection solutions have been previously proposed to create a reliable surveillance system for elderly people with high requirements on accuracy. In this paper, an enhanced fall detection system is proposed for elderly person monitoring that is based on smart sensors worn on the body and operating through long distance as well as consumer home networks. The principle behind this work is the detection of changes in the motion and position using the sensor which tracks the acceleration changes in three orthogonal directions. By using MEM's accelerometer sensor is used for determining exact angle of an elderly person with the help of signal magnitude vector (SMV). When the fall is detected the GPS locates the exact fall location and GSM modem is used to transmit the message to the mobile phone of caretakers/relatives of the fallen subjects at that time also send their latitude and longitude value by using GPS. This alert message helps to provide immediate assistance and treatment

Optimal coverage multi-path scheduling scheme with multiple mobile sinks for WSNs

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are usually formed with many tiny sensors which are randomly deployed within sensing field for target monitoring. These sensors can transmit their monitored data to the sink in a multi-hop communication manner. However, the ‘hot spots’ problem will be caused since nodes near sink will consume more energy during forwarding. Recently, mobile sink based technology provides an alternative solution for the long-distance communication and sensor nodes only need to use single hop communication to the mobile sink during data transmission. Even though it is difficult to consider many network metrics such as sensor position, residual energy and coverage rate etc., it is still very important to schedule a reasonable moving trajectory for the mobile sink. In this paper, a novel trajectory scheduling method based on coverage rate for multiple mobile sinks (TSCR-M) is presented especially for large-scale WSNs. An improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) combined with mutation operator is introduced to search the parking positions with optimal coverage rate. Then the genetic algorithm (GA) is adopted to schedule the moving trajectory for multiple mobile sinks. Extensive simulations are performed to validate the performance of our proposed method

Development of a Real-Time, Simple and High-Accuracy Fall Detection System for Elderly Using 3-DOF Accelerometers

© 2018, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals. Falls represent a major problem for the elderly people aged 60 or above. There are many monitoring systems which are currently available to detect the fall. However, there is a great need to propose a system which is of optimal effectiveness. In this paper, we propose to develop a low-cost fall detection system to precisely detect an event when an elderly person accidentally falls. The fall detection algorithm compares the acceleration with lower fall threshold and upper fall threshold values to accurately detect a fall event. The post-fall recognition module is the combination of posture recognition and vertical velocity estimation that has been added to our proposed method to enhance the performance and accuracy. In case of a fall, our device will transmit the location information to the contacts instantly via SMS and voice call. A smartphone application will ensure that the notifications are delivered to the elderly person’s relatives so that medical attention can be provided with minimal delay. The system was tested by volunteers and achieved 100% sensitivity and accuracy. This was confirmed by testing with public datasets and it also achieved the same percentage in sensitivity and accuracy as in our recorded datasets

Personalized fall detection monitoring system based on learning from the user movements

Personalized fall detection system is shown to provide added and more benefits compare to the current fall detection system. The personalized model can also be applied to anything where one class of data is hard to gather. The results show that adapting to the user needs, improve the overall accuracy of the system. Future work includes detection of the smartphone on the user so that the user can place the system anywhere on the body and make sure it detects. Even though the accuracy is not 100% the proof of concept of personalization can be used to achieve greater accuracy. The concept of personalization used in this paper can also be extended to other research in the medical field or where data is hard to come by for a particular class. More research into the feature extraction and feature selection module should be investigated. For the feature selection module, more research into selecting features based on one class data

Context aware adaptable approach for fall detection bases on Smart textile

Fall detection is very important to provide adequate interventions for aging people in risk situations. Existing techniques focus on detecting falls using wearable or ambient sensors. However, they do not consider fall orientations. In this paper, we present our novel fall detection system based on smart textiles and machine learning techniques. Using a non-linear support vector machine, we determine the fall orientation which will be helpful to study the impact of a fall according to its orientation. Additionally, we classify falls based on their orientations among 11 classes (moving upstairs, moving downstairs, walking, running, standing, fall forward, fall backward, fall right, fall left, lying, sitting). Results show the reliability of the proposed approach for falls detection (98% of accuracy, 97.5% of sensitivity and 98.5% specificity) and also for fall orientation (98.5% of accuracy)

Internet of Things Enabled Technologies for Behaviour Analytics in Elderly Person Care: A Survey

The advances in sensor technology over recent years has provided new ways for researchers to monitor the elderly in uncontrolled environments. Sensors have become smaller, cheaper and can be worn on the body, potentially creating a network of sensors. Smart phones are also more common in the average household and can also provide some behavioural analysis due to the built in sensors. As a result of this, researchers are able to monitor behaviours in a more natural setting, which can lead to more useful data. This is important for those that may be suffering from mental illness as it allows for continuous, non-invasive monitoring in order to diagnose symptoms from different behaviours. However there are various challenges that need to be addressed ranging from issues with sensors to the involvement of human factors. It is vital that these challenges are taken into consideration along with the major behavioural symptoms that can appear in an Elderly Person. For a person suffering with Dementia, the application of sensor technologies can improve the quality of life of the person and also monitor the progress of the disease through behavioural analysis. This paper will consider the behaviours that can be associated with dementia and how these behaviours can be monitored through sensor technology. We will also provide an insight into some sensors and algorithms gathered through survey in order to provide advantages and disadvantages of these technologies as well as to present any challenges that may face future research