A Smart and Passive Floor-Vibration Based Fall Detector for Elderly

TLDR

Falls are common among the elderly, ranking as the second leading cause of unintentional injury death overall and the top cause for those over 79, and medical outcomes depend heavily on response time, yet existing fall detectors are often intrusive or require user compliance. The study aims to develop a highly accurate, automatic fall detector to expedite medical care for older adults. The authors present a passive, floor‑vibration fall detector that avoids user compliance issues, and evaluate its performance in controlled laboratory tests with anthropomorphic dummies. The detector achieved a 100 % fall detection rate with minimal false alarms in laboratory tests.

Abstract

Falls are very prevalent among the elderly. They are the second leading cause of unintentional-injury death for people of all ages and the leading cause of death for elders 79 years and older. Studies have shown that the medical outcome of a fall is largely dependent upon the response and rescue time. Hence, a highly accurate automatic fall detector is an important component of the living setting for older adult to expedite and improve the medical care provided to this population. Though there are several kinds of fall detectors currently available, they suffer from various drawbacks. Some of them are intrusive while others require the user to wear and activate the devices, and hence may fail in the event of user non-compliance. This paper describes the working principle and the design of a floor vibration-based fall detector that is completely passive and unobtrusive to the resident. The detector was designed to overcome some of the common drawbacks of the earlier fall detectors. The performance of the detector is evaluated by conducting controlled laboratory tests using anthropomorphic dummies. The results showed 100% fall detection rate with minimum potential for false alarms