Journal of information and communication convergence engineering

The Korea Institute of Information and Commucation Engineering (한국정보통신학회)
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Emergency Monitoring System Based on a Newly-Developed Fall Detection Algorithm

  • Yi, Yun Jae (Department of Electrical, Electronic and Control Engineering, Hankyong National University) ;
  • Yu, Yun Seop (Department of Electrical, Electronic and Control Engineering, Hankyong National University)
  • Received : 2013.02.28
  • Accepted : 2013.04.15
  • Published : 2013.09.30
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

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