A system for ubiquitous fall monitoring at home via a wireless sensor network

Accidental falls of our elderly, and physical injuries resulting, represent a major health and economic. Falls are the most common causes of serious injuries and a major health threats in the stratum of older population. Early detection of a fall is a key factor when trying to provide adequate care to the elderly person who has suffered an accident at home. In this paper, we present a support system for detecting falls of an elder person by a static wireless nonintrusive sensorial infrastructure based on heterogenous sensor nodes. This previous infrastructure, named AID (Alarm Intelligent Device), is an AAL (Ambient Assisted Living) system that allows to infer a potential fall. We have developed, different to other contributions, a specific low-power multi-hop network consists of nodes (Motes) that wirelessly communicate to each other and are capable of hopping radio messages to a base station where they are passed to a PC (or other possible client). The goal of this project is 1) to provide alerts to caregivers in the event of an accident, acute illness or strange (possibly dangerous) activities, and 2) to enable that authorized and authenticated caregivers by means of a itinerant wearable mote can be inserted into mesh and interact with it. In this paper, we describe an ubiquitous assistential monitoring system at home.