Design and Research of Wearable Fall Protection Device for the Elderly

Abstract

A protective device was designed that can be worn on the elderly, which consists of protective airbag, control box and protective mechanism. The combined acceleration, combined angular velocity and human posture angle are selected as the parameters to determine the fall, and the threshold algorithm and SVM algorithm are used to detect the fall. The protective mechanism is an inflatable device based on CO2 compressed air cylinder, and the equal-width cam structure is applied to its transmission part to improve the puncture efficiency of the compressed gas cylinder. A fall experiment was designed to obtain the combined acceleration and angular velocity eigenvalues of fall actions (forward fall, backward fall and lateral fall) and daily activities (sitting-standing, walking, jogging and walking up and down stairs), showing that the specificity and sensitivity of the protection module reached 92.1% and 84.4% respectively, which verified the feasibility of the fall protection device.