Smart-hat: Safe and smooth walking assistant for elderly people

Elderly people in our society may be visually challenged, physically weak and thus face troubles during day-to-day life movement. Due to poor vision, often they fail to detect obstacles around them and hurt themselves. Due to aging, abnormal involuntary movements and lack of a timely rescue system, the magnitude of injury and other adverse effects worsens. One possible way to reduce these old age sufferings could be to design an assistive device which can take corrective measures based on position, neighborhood information and the event of fall (if any). The aim of this research is to develop a cost effective, comfortable and easily producible smart-hat for safe and smooth movement of the elderly people. Since wearing a hat is a common phenomenon for elderly people, smart-hat will get ease of acceptance by them. Some of the key features to be offered by the smart-hat are — obstacle detection, providing aid in the movement in a straight path and fall detection. No such technology exists at present that incorporates all these features in a single device. The proposed device uses a very simple methodology. This system takes reading from an accelerometer and differentiates a fall from other normal activities using an adaptive threshold set in triaxial directions. This device aids an elderly person to walk straight using the angular displacement of head movement obtained from a gyroscope. Lastly, few sonar sensors are attached to the hat to sense obstacles around the user covering a 360-degree range. During an event of fall, the system keeps sending request for help to pre-assigned caregivers by using a GSM module, until any of them responds. Also, the device makes wireless arrangement for opening the lock of the front door for the ease of rescue operation when the victim is at home. The device showed an overall success rate of nearly 86.25%. The implications of this safe and smooth movement assistant would be to reduce the number of accidents, decrease the time of arrival of medical attention, increase supervision capability, thus reducing injuries as well as mortality rate; which in turn will ensure independent living of the target group.