Title :
Initial home-based foot-mat design & analysis of bio-gait characteristics to prevent fall in elderly people
Author :
Low, K.H. ; Tani, Jeffry William ; Chandra, Teguh ; Wang, Ping
Author_Institution :
Sch. of Mech. & Aerosp. Eng., Nanyang Technol. Univ., Singapore, Singapore
Abstract :
Falls are among the most frequent occasions happening on elderly. Moreover, falls can cause fatal effect on them. One of the issues related to elderly health, which can incur falls, is the gait characteristics. Thus, it will be useful to set up a monitoring system for home-use to detect the gait characteristics of the elderly. With this daily monitoring system, the changes in gait characteristics, which are leading to proneness of falls and hardly being distinguished by naked-eyes, can be noticed. The reliability of the home-system was also verified with a comparison to Gaitrite. Finally, modeling experiments shows the effectiveness of the monitoring system. In conclusion, a home-system having reasonable price can be produced and is able to provide daily non-intrusive monitoring.
Keywords :
biomedical equipment; biomedical measurement; force sensors; gait analysis; geriatrics; patient monitoring; Flexiforce sensors; Gaitrite; bio-gait characteristics; data acquisition system; elderly people; falls; force sensing resistor; home-based foot-mat design; monitoring system; reliability; signal amplifier; Aerospace engineering; Biomimetics; Cardiac disease; Cardiovascular diseases; Force feedback; Hospitals; Medical services; Monitoring; Robots; Senior citizens; Aging; Foot-mat; Gait; Monitoring system; Slips and falls;
Conference_Titel :
Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO), 2009 IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Guilin
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-4774-9
Electronic_ISBN :
978-1-4244-4775-6
DOI :
10.1109/ROBIO.2009.5420577
