Research Article
Design and Evaluation of a Fall Detection Algorithm on Mobile Phone Platform
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-23902-1_4, author={Manuel Silva and Pedro Teixeira and Filipe Abrantes and Filipe Sousa}, title={Design and Evaluation of a Fall Detection Algorithm on Mobile Phone Platform}, proceedings={Ambient Media and Systems. Second International ICST Conference, AMBI-SYS 2011, Porto, Portugal, March 24-25, 2011, Revised Selected Papers}, proceedings_a={AMBI-SYS}, year={2012}, month={5}, keywords={Fall-detection Algorithm Accelerometer Activities of Daily Living}, doi={10.1007/978-3-642-23902-1_4} }- Manuel Silva
Pedro Teixeira
Filipe Abrantes
Filipe Sousa
Year: 2012
Design and Evaluation of a Fall Detection Algorithm on Mobile Phone Platform
AMBI-SYS
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-23902-1_4
Abstract
The increasingly aging population will pose a severe burden to the health services. Falls are a major health risk that diminishes the quality of life among the elderly people and increases the health services cost. Reliable fall detection and notification is essential to improve the post-fall medical outcome which is largely dependent upon the response and rescue time. In this paper, we analyze mobile phones as a platform for developing a fall detection system. The feasibility of such platform is assessed by running an acceleration based fall detection algorithm on the phone. The algorithm was implemented for the Android OS and tested on several HTC models, which included a MEMS accelerometer. Extensive simulations of fall events as well as activities of daily life were conducted on a lab environment to evaluate the system performance. Experimental results of our system, which we still consider as work in progress, are encouraging making us optimistic regarding the feasibility of a highly reliable phone-based fall detector.