Automatic Fall Detection

Automatic fall detection using the accelerometer and pulse detector is the novel method of detection of a fall. I would like to dedicate this project for the elderly people who we find to be unattended most of the times. It is estimated that about 1.5-2 million people in India die due to a trauma cause due to a fall. My target initially is to detect a fall and alert the relatives. Later on the ideas of prevention of a fall can also be integrated into my project.

In this project, we make use of an accelerometer and a pulse detector to find out a fall. The existing methods lack the pulse detector!! The accelerometer is a device that tells us about the acceleration of an object. In this project the very use of accelerometer is to find the orientation of a person. The pulse detection is done by using a simple IR sensor that works along with a proximity sensor to detect the human pulse. The accelerometer and the pulse detector values are compared and we arrive at the conclusion whether the person has fallen or not. If the person has fallen but he is conscious or if our result was a false one, we have utilized a terminating switch for the person himself to terminate the alerting of the relatives. But if the person is unconscious then the relatives can be alerted using some of the existing techniques like GSM etc.

All the available work done is on the physical field which deals with the fall and comparing the accelerometer readings. I strongly feel that a biological entity needs to be considered to decide on the fall. The numbers of false signal that are generated during the existing methods are many. To judge on a fall is very difficult. To deal with a real time system we need something that can vary with a person’s biological being. One of the biological entity that varies with the physical nature is the heart beat. And during a fall the oxygen requirement varies and hence the intake of oxygen is varied. Thus the heart beat stands as a strong candidate for the detection of a fall.

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tags

Alarm, Appliances, Health, Monitor