• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.370-375
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• 2023

As we enter a super-aged society, studies are being conducted to reduce complications and deaths caused by falls in elderly adults. Research is being conducted on interventions for preventing falls in the elderly, wearable devices for detecting falls, and methods for improving the performance of fall detection algorithms. Wearable devices for detecting falls of the elderly generally use gyro sensors. In addition, to improve the performance of the fall detection algorithm, an artificial intelligence algorithm is applied to the x, y, z coordinate data collected from the gyro sensor. In this paper, we develop a wearable device that uses a gyro sensor, body temperature, and heart rate sensor for health management as well as fall detection for the elderly. In addition, we develop a fall detection and health management system that works with wearable devices and a guardian's mobile app to improve the performance of the fall detection algorithm and provide health information to guardians.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.11-17
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• 2017

To the elderly, sudden falls are one of the most frightening accidents. If an accident occurs, a prompt action has to be taken to deal with the situation. Recently, there have been a number of attempts to detect sudden falls using acceleration sensors embedded in the mobile devices, such as smart phones and wrist-bands. However, using the sensor readings only, the detection rate of the falls is around 65%. Ordinary daily activities such as running or jumping could not be well distinguished from the falls. In this paper, we describe our attempts on improving the fall-detection rate. We implemented a wrist-band fall detection module, using a three-axis acceleration sensor. With the pattern matching on the fall signal-strength frequency spectrum, in addition to the conventional signal strength measurement, we could improve the detection rate by 9% point. Furthermore, by applying two wrist-bands in the experiment, we could further improve the detection rate to 82%.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.1564-1572
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• 2010

In this study, the falls detection and direction classification system was implemented using 3-axial acceleration signal. The acceleration signals were acquired from the 3-axial accelerometer(MMA7260Q, Freescale, USA), and then transmitted to the computer through USB interface. The implemented system can detect falls using the newly proposed algorithm, and also classify the direction of falls using fuzzy classifier. The 6 subjects was selected for experiment and the accelerometer was attached on each subject's chest. Each subject walked in normal pace for 5 seconds, and then the fall down according to the four direction(front_fall, back_fall, left_fall and right_fall) during at least 2 second. The falls was easily detect using the newly proposed algorithm in this study. The acquired signals were analyzed after 1 second from generating falls. The fuzzy classifier was used to classify the direction of falls. The mean value of the falls detection rate was 94.79%. The classifier rate according to falls direction were 95.83% in case of front falls, 100% incase of back falls, 87.5% in case of left falls, and 95.83% in case of right falls.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.11 no.sup
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• pp.113-121
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• 2012

In this study, a real-time fall detection system based on a smartphone equipped with three-axis accelerometer and magnetometer was proposed and evaluated. The proposed system provides a service that detects falls in real time, triggers alarm sound, and sends emergency SMS(Short Message Service) if the alarm is not deactivated within a predefined time. When both of the acceleration magnitude and angle displacement of the smartphone attached to waist belt are greater than predefined thresholds, it is detected as a fall. The proposed system was evaluated against activities of daily living(walking, jogging, sitting down, standing up, ascending stairs, and descending stairs) and unintended falls induced by a proprietary pneumatic-powered mattress. With the thresholds of acceleration magnitude 1.7g and angle displacement $80^{\circ}$, it showed 96.5% accuracy to detect the falls while all the activities of daily living were not detected as fall.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.199-206
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• 2013

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.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.17 no.9
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• pp.2377-2398
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• 2023

In our daily lives, we engage in a variety of tasks that rely on our senses, such as seeing. Blindness is the absence of the sense of vision. According to the World Health Organization, 2.2 billion people worldwide suffer from various forms of vision impairment. Unfortunately, blind people face a variety of indoor and outdoor challenges on a daily basis, limiting their mobility and preventing them from engaging in other activities. Blind people are very vulnerable to a variety of hazards, including falls. Various barriers, such as stairs, can cause a fall. The Internet of Things (IoT) is used to track falls and send a warning message to the blind caretakers. One of the gaps in the previous works is that they were unable to differentiate between falls true and false. Treating false falls as true falls results in many false alarms being sent to the blind caretakers and thus, they may reject the IoT system. As a means of bridging this chasm, this paper proposes an intelligent shoe that is able to precisely distinguish between false and true falls based on three sensors, namely, the load scale sensor, the light sensor, and the Flex sensor. The proposed IoT system is tested in an indoor environment for various scenarios of falls using four models of machine learning. The results from our system showed an accuracy of 0.96%. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our system is simpler and more accurate since it avoids sending false alarms to the blind caretakers.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.362-367
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• 2014

In this study, a postural change detection sensor module (PCDSM) was developed to detect postural changes in activities of daily living (ADL) and falls. The PCDSM consists of eight mercury sensors that measure angle variations in $360^{\circ}$ rotation and $90^{\circ}$ tilting. From the preliminary study, the output characteristics of the PCDSM were confirmed with the angle variations of rotational motion and a tilting table. Three experiments were conducted to test rotational motion, postural changes, and falling and lying. The results confirmed that the PCDSM could effectively detect postural changes, movement patterns, and falls or non-falls.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.28 no.11
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• pp.1330-1338
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• 2011

Social activities of the elderly have been increasing as our society progresses toward an aging society. As their activities increase, so does the occurrence of falls that could lead to fractures. Falls are serious health hazards to the elderly. Therefore, development of a device that can detect fall accidents and prevent fracture is essential. In this study, we developed a portable fall detection system for the fracture prevention system of the elderly. The device is intended to detect a fall and activate a second device such as an air bag deployment system that can prevent fracture. The fall detection device contains a 3-axis acceleration sensor and two 2-axis tilt sensors. We measured acceleration and tilt angle of body during fall and activities of daily(ADL) living using the fall detection device that is attached on the subjects'. Moving mattress which is actuated by a pneumatic system was used in fall experiments and it could provide forced falls. Sensor data during fall and ADL were sent to computer and filtered with low-pass filter. The developed fall detection device was successful in detecting a fall about 0.1 second before a severe impact to occur and detecting the direction of the fall to provide enough time and information for the fracture preventive device to be activated. The fall detection device was also able to differentiate fall from ADL such as walking, sitting down, standing up, lying down, and running.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.79-89
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• 2018

In recent years, falls among elderly people have gained serious attention as a major cause of injuries. Falls often lead to fatal consequences due to lack of prompt response and rescue. Therefore, a more accurate fall detection system and an effective feature extraction technique are required to prevent and reduce the risk of such incidents. In this paper, we proposed an efficient feature extraction technique based on multiple sliding windows and validated it through a series of experiments using supervised learning algorithms. The experiments were conducted using the public datasets obtained from tri-axial accelerometers. The results depicted that extraction of the feature from adjacent sliding windows led to high accuracy in supervised machine learning-based fall detection. Also, the experiments conducted in this study suggested that the best accuracy can be achieved by keeping the window size as small as 2 seconds. With the kNN classifier and dataset from wearable sensors, the experiments achieved accuracy rates of 94%.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.44 no.4
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• pp.654-671
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• 2022

Accidental falls frequently occur during activities of daily living. Although many studies have proposed various accident detection methods, no high-performance accident detection system is available. In this study, we propose a method for integrating data and accident detection algorithms presented in existing studies, collect new data (from two stunt performers and 15 people over age 60) using a developed wearable device, demonstrate new features and related accident detection algorithms, and analyze the performance of the proposed method against existing methods. Comparative analysis results show that the newly defined features extracted reflect more important risk factors than those used in existing studies. Further, although the traditional algorithms applied to integrated data achieved an accuracy (AC) of 79.5% and a false positive rate (FPR) of 19.4%, the proposed accident detection algorithms achieved 97.8% AC and 2.9% FPR. The high AC and low FPR for accidental falls indicate that the proposed method exhibits a considerable advancement toward developing a commercial accident detection system.