Design and implementation of a fall detection system on a Zynq board

Population aging has become a worldwide problem. Fall accidents are considered as one of the major health risks, especially for elderly people. Fall detection devices are the key to distinguish a fall from daily activities, automatically alert when a fall occurred and significantly decrease the time of rescue when the monitored patient falls down. The proposed prototype is composed of a tri-axial accelerometer communicating to a Zybo board through Inter-Integrated Circuit (I
²
C) interface. A threshold-based algorithm has been implemented based on peaks acceleration detection and inactivity posture recognition after falling and executed as a standalone application on a Zynq Z-7010 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). This first implementation using Vivado and Xilinx SDK showed prominent results in terms of power consumption and time of execution.