Fall event detection by gyroscopic and accelerometer sensors in smart phone

Abstract

Falling events cause serious injury both in physiology and psychology to the most of the people, especially to the elderly people. Although the government have been making effort to build a safety environment to avoid the occurrence of falling event; however, the news of elder people falling still happen very often. Nowadays, the popularity of smart phone makes it one of the necessaries in daily life. Smart phones not only pose the communication functions and entertainment purpose but also equipped with various sensors for rich applications. In this paper, we use the gyroscopic and accelerometer sensors in the smart phone to detect the falling event. The smart phone is mounted on the waist. Generally, falling is lying on the ground. Here, tilt testing from gyroscopic sensor is used to detect the occurrence of lying at first. If it happened, we analyze the signal from a triaxial accelerometer by discrete cosine transform for furthermore detecting the falling. Once the falling event is detected, smart phone alert sounds to let people nearby for immediate assistance. In addition, it will transmit the falling event message and location information to the related by the smart phone. This method can detect the falling event precisely in very economical way.