Assistive Technology for Fall Detection Development of Integrated Wearable Sensor to Smart Home System

Fall detection is an assistive technology for elderly people that helps in emergency situations. This work presents the development of a wearable device to detect falls connected to a ultra low power wireless network. The device is connected to a smart home system to trigger alarms when events are detected. The fall detection is done by a threshold algorithm based on data fusion from inertial sensors. The wearable sensor is based on EnOcean protocol, which includes a wireless connection with a smart home system, according to the KNX standard, through the Home Assistant platform. The tests were performed in a prototype and the results include the evaluation of fall and nonfall movements in two different body characteristics. The results revealed sensitivity and specificity of up to 96% and 100%, respectively.