Accurate, Fast Fall Detection Using Gyroscopes and Accelerometer-Derived Posture Information

Falls are dangerous for the aged population as they can adversely affect health. Therefore, many fall detection systems have been developed. However, prevalent methods only use accelerometers to isolate falls from Activities of Daily Living (ADL). This makes it difficult to distinguish real falls from certain fall-like activities such as sitting down quickly and jumping, resulting in many false positives. Body orientation is also used as a means of detecting falls, but it is not very useful when the ending position is not horizontal, e.g. falls happen on stairs.