Design of a fall detection system

The development of wireless sensor network (WSN) technologies has become very important in recent years, especially in the domain of electronic healthcare. The rate of falling down happened in elderly people is about 15% to 40% every year, and the times of fall will increase along with their age. Most of the fall will cause the elderly people to be hospitalized, or to reside in nursing home, and it will also cause the barriers of their daily activities. Therefore, if we can deal with the fall of elderly people in the first time, we will decrease the rate of injuries and reduce the cost of medical treatment. Our design, the fall detection system, can detect the fall from a portable device worn in user's waist and receive a warning message through the connection of WSN, GSM and Internet. If a fall situation was happened, the wearing device will send a message to the unit of medical treatment automatically. The design of such system can increase the living time of sufferers, and reduce the rate of death due to the fall.