GPS-based fall detection system for old and specially-abled people

Abstract

Falls are a serious public health concern for older people across the world. Modern telemedicine now depends heavily on remote monitoring of older patients and the ability to spot threats to human health. If a fall is not assisted in time, it can significantly reduce an older person's mobility, independence, and his/her quality of life. Older people who experience post-traumatic problems or mortality frequently do so because of falls. As a result, preventing falls consequences or providing essential help on time may depend on the early identification of falls. In this article, we propose an internet of things (IoT) based system that makes use of low-power wireless sensor networks, smart devices and cloud computing to detect falls and track positions for older and specially-abled people. The tracking is done by sending links of positions from the proposed system every 15 seconds to a specified google drive. On the other hand, an alert message will be delivered to the caregiver whenever a fall is happened. Thus, a MPU-6050 sensor and NEO-6M global positioning system (GPS) module are used with ESP32 microcontroller for the aforementioned purposes. A pilot study with several protocols was carried out to validate the cost-effective proposed system and achieved good results.