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Objective: In geriatric institutions, the risk of falling of patients is very high and frequently leads to fractures of the femoral neck, which can result in serious consequences and medical costs. With regard to the current numbers of elderly people, the need for smart solutions for the prevention of falls in clinical environments as well as in everyday life has been evolving. Methods: Hence, in this paper, we present the Inexpensive Node for bed-exit Detection (INBED), a comprehensive, favourable signaling system for bed-exit detection and fall prevention, to support the clinical efforts in terms of fall reduction. The tough requirements for such a system in clinical environments were gathered in close cooperation with geriatricians. Results: The conceptional efforts led to a multi-component system with a core wearable device, attached to the patients, to detect several types of movements such as rising, restlessness and—in the worst case—falling. Occurring events are forwarded to the nursing staff immediately by using a modular, self-organizing and dependable wireless infrastructure. Both, the hardware and software of the entire INBED system as well as the particular design process are discussed in detail. Moreover, a trail test of the system is presented. Conclusions: The INBED system can help to relieve the nursing staff significantly while the personal freedom of movement and the privacy of patients is increased compared to similar systems.

Abstract-INGA is a cost-efficient and universal wireless sensor node for activity monitoring and for general applications. INGA's architecture bases on an 8-bit Atmel microcontroller and runs Contiki OS and TinyOS "out of the box". The motivation to develop INGA was driven by the need for a reasonable, cheap and expandable node for several use cases: On the one hand, in a research project, we intend to do a gait analysis of elderly persons with it, on the other hand we want to equip our student WSN lab with new nodes. For the first case none of the existing nodes fulfilled our requirements concerning assembled sensors and functionality. In this paper, we present the motivation and design for "yet another sensor node"; furthermore, we present the detailed architecture and its benefits in comparison to other nodes. The first measurement results using INGA show its characteristics and usability. INGA is completely under opensource license and all resources are provided to the community.

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