Emergency Monitoring System Based on a Newly-Developed Fall Detection Algorithm

An emergency monitoring system for the elderly, which uses acceleration data measured with an accelerometer, angular velocity data measured with a gyroscope, and heart rate measured with an electrocardiogram, is proposed. The proposed fall detection algorithm uses multiple parameter combinations in which all parameters, calculated using tri-axial accelerations and bi-axial angular velocities, are above a certain threshold within a time period. Further, we propose an emergency detection algorithm that monitors the movements of the fallen elderly person, after a fall is detected. The results show that the proposed algorithms can distinguish various types of falls from activities of daily living with 100% sensitivity and 98.75% specificity. In addition, when falls are detected, the emergency detection rate is 100%. This suggests that the presented fall and emergency detection method provides an effective automatic fall detection and emergency alarm system. The proposed algorithms are simple enough to be implemented into an embedded system such as 8051-based microcontroller with 128 kbyte ROM.