Internet of Things for fall prediction and prevention

Internet of Things (IoT) is making a breakthrough for the development of innovative healthcare systems. IoT-based health applications are expected to change the paradigm traditionally followed by physicians for diagnosis, by moving health monitoring from the clinical environment to the domestic space. Fall avoidance is a field where the continuous monitoring allowed by the IoT-based framework offers tremendous benefits to the user. In fact, falls are highly damaging due to both physical and psychological injuries. Currently, the most promising approaches to reduce fall injuries are fall prediction, which strives to predict a fall before its occurrence, and fall prevention, which assesses balance and muscle strength through some clinical functional tests. In this context, the IoT-based framework provides real-time emergency notification as soon as fall is predicted, mid-term analysis on the monitored activities, and data logging for long-term analysis by clinical experts. This approach gives more information to experts for estimating the risk of a future fall and for suggesting proper exercises

Fall Prediction and Prevention Systems: Recent Trends, Challenges, and Future Research Directions.

Fall prediction is a multifaceted problem that involves complex interactions between physiological, behavioral, and environmental factors. Existing fall detection and prediction systems mainly focus on physiological factors such as gait, vision, and cognition, and do not address the multifactorial nature of falls. In addition, these systems lack efficient user interfaces and feedback for preventing future falls. Recent advances in internet of things (IoT) and mobile technologies offer ample opportunities for integrating contextual information about patient behavior and environment along with physiological health data for predicting falls. This article reviews the state-of-the-art in fall detection and prediction systems. It also describes the challenges, limitations, and future directions in the design and implementation of effective fall prediction and prevention systems

Is the timed-up and go test feasible in mobile devices? A systematic review

The number of older adults is increasing worldwide, and it is expected that by 2050 over 2 billion individuals will be more than 60 years old. Older adults are exposed to numerous pathological problems such as Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, post-stroke, and orthopedic disturbances. Several physiotherapy methods that involve measurement of movements, such as the Timed-Up and Go test, can be done to support efficient and effective evaluation of pathological symptoms and promotion of health and well-being. In this systematic review, the authors aim to determine how the inertial sensors embedded in mobile devices are employed for the measurement of the different parameters involved in the Timed-Up and Go test. The main contribution of this paper consists of the identification of the different studies that utilize the sensors available in mobile devices for the measurement of the results of the Timed-Up and Go test. The results show that mobile devices embedded motion sensors can be used for these types of studies and the most commonly used sensors are the magnetometer, accelerometer, and gyroscope available in off-the-shelf smartphones. The features analyzed in this paper are categorized as quantitative, quantitative + statistic, dynamic balance, gait properties, state transitions, and raw statistics. These features utilize the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors and facilitate recognition of daily activities, accidents such as falling, some diseases, as well as the measurement of the subject's performance during the test execution.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Detecting Irregular Patterns in IoT Streaming Data for Fall Detection

Detecting patterns in real time streaming data has been an interesting and challenging data analytics problem. With the proliferation of a variety of sensor devices, real-time analytics of data from the Internet of Things (IoT) to learn regular and irregular patterns has become an important machine learning problem to enable predictive analytics for automated notification and decision support. In this work, we address the problem of learning an irregular human activity pattern, fall, from streaming IoT data from wearable sensors. We present a deep neural network model for detecting fall based on accelerometer data giving 98.75 percent accuracy using an online physical activity monitoring dataset called "MobiAct", which was published by Vavoulas et al. The initial model was developed using IBM Watson studio and then later transferred and deployed on IBM Cloud with the streaming analytics service supported by IBM Streams for monitoring real-time IoT data. We also present the systems architecture of the real-time fall detection framework that we intend to use with mbientlabs wearable health monitoring sensors for real time patient monitoring at retirement homes or rehabilitation clinics.Comment: 7 page