An Autonomous Fall Detection and Alerting System Based on Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing

This paper presents information on an autonomous fall detection and alerting system mainly consisting of a custom vest and a mobile smart phone. A 3-axial accelerator and gyroscope with a main board and Bluetooth are built into a custom vest worn by elderly. The vest can capture the data about the activities of daily living (ADLs) of elderly in real time. The data via Bluetooth is then sent to a mobile smart phone equipped with a threshold-based fall detection algorithm based on 3-axial accelerator and angular velocity. When a fall occurs the phone can alert a family member or health care center through a call or an emergent text message with a built in global positioning system (GPS) location, so as to provide a fast and accurate intervention. The experimental results show that the system discriminates falls from ADLs with a sensitivity of 95.74% and a specificity of 88.75%, for a total set of 175 movements.