A wearable wireless platform for fall and mobility monitoring

In this paper a new wearable wireless fall and mobility monitoring platform is presented. The platform was developed as part of a European Commission funded project called CAA-LYX. The fall and mobility sensor is based on the use of a tri-axial accelerometer. With the accelerometer, impacts are recorded and together with mobility data, also obtained from the accelerometers, fall events are identified. Fall event data, but also raw accelerometer signals, can be conveyed to a mobile phone or PC using a Bluetooth connection. In laboratory based fall trials with young healthy subjects a PC was used to store all data coming from the fall and mobility sensors. A mobile phone was used in an experiment with elderly people performing normal activities of daily living, where only the user status was conveyed to a server and raw accelerometer data were stored locally. With the phone, the whole system is wearable and can relay alarms to a care taker wherever the user may be. During the experiments, in which a total of 165 simulated ADL, 264 simulated falls and 833 hours of real ADL were collected, the fall and mobility sensor demonstrated its ability to accurately identify fall events.