The design of a smartphone-based fall detection system

The eldercare problem becomes important due to population ageing. A fall accident may cause serious injury to the elderly. How to automatically detect a fall and quickly launch a help message becomes crucial, particularly for those elders living alone. The smartphone that is frequently carried by a person has the potential to be a natural tool to provide this fall detection service. In this paper, a string matching based algorithm is applied to recognize all possible fall events from the acceleration values sensed by the smartphone. A corresponding application is also implemented on the android-based platform.