An overview of fall-related systems developed in canes

Abstract

The number of falls is growing as the main cause of injuries and deaths in the geriatric community. As a result, also the cost of treating the injuries associated with falls is increasing. Thus, the development of fall detection and prediction systems with the capability of real-time monitoring without user restriction is imperative. For this reason, canes can be a great choice to embed fall-related systems. This paper aims to achieve a complete state-of-the-art concerning the development of fall detection and prediction algorithms implemented in canes. In order to accomplish this goal, a comprehensive search was performed. This search includes the IEEE, Scopus and Web of Science databases regarding developed systems in the literature. Also, a commercial search on Google and a patent search on Espacenet and the United States Patent and Trademark Office was performed. To this day, it has not been developed any type of cane related system which focuses on the temporal window preceding a fall and that accesses the risk of falling, even though a considerable amount of fall detection systems have already been presented.This work has been supported by the FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - with the scholarship reference PD/BD/141515/2018, by the FEDER funds through the COMPETE 2020 - Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização (POCI) and P2020 with the Reference Project EML under Grant POCI-01-0247-FEDER-033067, and through the COMPETE 2020 POCI with the Reference Project under Grant POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006941