Real-time fall detection and tagless localization using radar techniques

The senior citizen population older than 60 years has been steadily increasing worldwide. Due to this evolution, healthcare is now a major point of attention in the entire world. In particular, falling represents the major risk for elderly people who live independently. In the last two decades, innovative technological approaches have been investigated aiming at human-being long-term monitoring. However, current solutions suffer from critical limitations in real-case situations. In this paper, a complete radar-based system for concurrent real-time contactless fall detection and tagless localization in a real in-door environment is presented and discussed. Experimental tests, conducted on persons in a real room setting, have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach showing an adequate detection of the person´s absolute distance and a success rate to detect fall events of 100% with a maximum delay of about 316 ms. In addition to that, no false positives have been reported.