One big worry for elderly and for their loved ones is falling. One third of the population
above 65 is injured by falling, and falling can cause serious injuries and even death [1,3]. For
example, my great grandfather died as a result of falling and not getting help quickly enough.
To solve this problem, I have
built a fall detection device. The device
will sense when the person wearing it
has fallen and then it will send a text
message to a guardian.
Fall detection devices have been
made before [2,5,7], but they are not
extensively used because frustration
with false positives and false negatives.
A false positive is false alarm, and a
false negative is a failure to send an
alarm that should have been sent. The
reason for this problem is that the
commercial fall detectors [2] use
accelerometers [5] to detect falls, and
accelerometers are noisy. This means
that they are overly sensitive. For
example, if someone were to sneeze, the high acceleration could set off the alarm [1]. If the
thresholds were to be set higher to avoid having sneezes set off alarms, then some real falls
may not be detected, instead causing false negatives. As a result, existing detectors have large
error rates [2].