Fall alarm and inactivity detection system design and implementation on Raspberry Pi

In this paper, a fall alarm and abnormal inactivity detection system is implemented on Raspberry Pi for security surveillance of empty-nesters in real time environment. We propose a novel method for fall alarm with a small amount of computing and we also present an inactivity detection method which we named "inactivity history" method to improve the accuracy of detection and it is a kind of adaptive method so it works well in even different environments. For fall alarm, we divide the image into many rectangular areas and according to the area of body in each rectangle we will judge whether the elderly fall or not. For inactivity detection, we count the average inactivity time of people in different rectangles to set up the inactivity history map to judge whether people are in abnormal inactivity accurately. There are also E-mail and SMS warning functionalities, providing a very good safeguard for the elderly. Meanwhile, terminal device have advantages of small size and low power consumption, which will lead to wide applications. The system satisfies real-time and reliable requirements. Extensive experiments carried out demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.