Mobile Security Monitor: A Wearable Computing Platform to Detect and Notify Falls

The use of sensors to monitor the environments and people has become an active research topic. Sensors have become increasingly efficient and smaller, and can be found embedded in all kind of personal accessories and clothes. The medical industry has benefited from this technology for all kinds of treatments, monitoring and preventions measures. The combination of mobile and wearable computing has the potential to produce cheap and of the shelf solutions to monitor patients remotely and to notify doctors and caregivers about abnormal vital signs or the occurrence of undesired events, such as falls of elderly people. In this scenario, this paper presents a technology to monitor the movement of patients and to notify their caregivers if a fall of the patient occurs. The proposed technology uses cheap wearable hardware and an application for mobile devices. An experiment was conducted in a lab to validate the proposal. Initial results indicates a promising solution.