Multi-Sensor Ambient Assisted Living System for Fall Detection

An important goal of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) research is to contribute to the quality of life of the elderly and handicapped people and help them to maintain an independent lifestyle with the use of sensors, signal processing and the available telecommunications infrastructure. From this perspective, detection of unusual human activities such as falling person detection is of utmost importance. In this article, a low-cost AAL system using vibration and passive infrared (PIR) sensors is described for falling person detection, human footstep detection, human motion detection, and unusual inactivity detection. The proposed AAL system works in real-time on a standard computer or chipKIT Uno32 microprocessors. The resulting AAL system is a low-cost and privacy-friendly system thanks to the types of sensors used.