Accidental falls are common causes of serious injury and health threats in the elder population. To deliver adequate medical support, the robust and immediate falls detection is important. Since the fall detection in the elderly remains a major challenge in the public health domain, effective fall-detection will provide urgent support and dramatically reduce the cost of medical care. In this work, we propose a fall-detecting system placing an accelerometer on the head level and using an algorithm to distinguish between falls and daily activities. The experimental results have demonstrated the proposed scheme with high reliability and sensitivity on fall detection. The system is not only cost effectively but also potable. It fulfills the requirements of fall detection.

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Patient monitoring systems are gaining their importance as the fast-growing global elderly population increases demands for caretaking. These systems use wireless technologies to transmit vital signs for medical evaluation. In a multihop ZigBee network, the existing systems usually use broadcast or multicast schemes to increase the reliability of signals transmission; however, both the schemes lead to significantly higher network traffic and end-to-end transmission delay. In this paper, we present a reliable transmission protocol based on anycast routing for wireless patient monitoring. Our scheme automatically selects the closest data receiver in an anycast group as a destination to reduce the transmission latency as well as the control overhead. The new protocol also shortens the latency of path recovery by initiating route recovery from the intermediate routers of the original path. On the basis of a reliable transmission scheme, we implement a ZigBee device for fall monitoring, which integrates fall detection, indoor positioning, and ECG monitoring. When the triaxial accelerometer of the device detects a fall, the current position of the patient is transmitted to an emergency center through a ZigBee network. In order to clarify the situation of the fallen patient, 4-s ECG signals are also transmitted. Our transmission scheme ensures the successful transmission of these critical messages. The experimental results show that our scheme is fast and reliable. We also demonstrate that our devices can seamlessly integrate with the next generation technology of wireless wide area network, worldwide interoperability for microwave access, to achieve real-time patient monitoring.

Falls often cause serious injury and health threats for elderly people. It is also the major obstacle to independent living for frail and elderly people. Many researchers try to establish an efficient fall prevention strategies for elderly people by collecting a lot of fall characteristics. However, it is difficult to obtain these characteristics simply from the questionnaires of elderly people. Since they may forget or misremember their falling scenario. In this work, we propose a fall characteristics collection system for designing fall prevention strategies. A waist-mounted tri-axial accelerometer is used to capture the movement data of the human body when elderly people fall. Then, the proposed algorithm uses the variations of angle between acceleration vector and three axes to determine the fall characteristics which include falling directions and impact parts. Experimental results demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed scheme. The system is not only cost effective but also portable that fulfills the requirements of fall characteristics data collection.

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