RAFDS: Remote Abnormality and Fall Detection System for Assisting Older Persons

Abstract: One of the main problems facing the public health is the injury that happens due to older persons falling, as these injuries can be fatal for them. Fast and proper medical interventions are crucial to reduce the serious consequences on their health. In this paper, a system is designed to continuously monitor vital signs and motion of older persons, and automatically detects incidents of abnormal vital signs as well as the fall of unattended older persons, and, accordingly, sends an alarm message to the concerned caregivers, to provide the needed help in the shortest delay possible. The proposed system is composed of three major modules; firstly the sensing module (SM), which continuously measures the acceleration of the monitored person, as well as vital signs of the monitored persons, such as the temperature and the heart pulse rate. Secondly, the decision making module (DMM) which is a processing element that receives the sensing signals from the sensors used in SM, analyzes them, then makes a decision if an abnormality or a fall is detected or not. Finally, if the DMM detects a fall, it sends this decision signal to the alarm module (AM), which sends SMS messages to the concerned caregivers, whose cell phone numbers, are pre-configured in the AM.

Keywords: Fall detection, heart pulse rate, body temperature, abnormality detection, remote detection.