Abstract
While aging is a serious global concern, in-home healthcare monitoring solutions are limited to context-aware systems and wearable sensors, which may easily be forgotten or ignored for privacy and comfort reasons. An emerging non-wearable fall detection approach is based on processing radio waves reflected off the body, who has no active interaction with the system. This paper reports on an indoor radio channel measurement campaign at 5.9 GHz, which has been conducted to study the impact of fall incidents and some daily life activities on the temporal and spectral properties of the indoor channel under both line-of-sight (LOS) and obstructed-LOS (OLOS) propagation conditions. The time-frequency characteristic of the channel has been thoroughly investigated by spectrogram analysis. Studying the instantaneous Doppler characteristics shows that the Doppler spread ignores small variations of the channel (especially under OLOS conditions), but highlights coarse ones caused by falls. The channel properties studied in this paper can be considered to be new useful metrics for the design of reliable fall detection algorithms. We share all measured data files with the community through Code Ocean. The data can be used for validating a new class of channel models aiming at the design of smart activity recognition systems via a software-based approach.
Highlights
This paper reports on an indoor radio channel measurement campaign at 5.9 GHz, which has been conducted to study the impact of fall incidents and some daily life activities on the temporal and spectral properties of the indoor channel under both line-of-sight (LOS) and obstructed-LOS (OLOS) propagation conditions
The first part reports the measurement results associated with S1, where a LOS between the the Rx (Tx) and Rx antennas exists, while the second one explains those of S2, where the communication is established under OLOS propagation conditions
The main goal of the experiment was to study the impact of some daily life activities of an elderly, including a fall incident, on the radio channel characteristics
Summary
According to the World Health Organization [1], around one third of people aged 65+ years fall at least twice a year. Two thirds of those who fall will do so again within six months. Fall incidents come often with serious physical injuries followed by extreme social isolation, if not Kodokushi (long-term undiscovered lonely death). This increases the demand for ambient-assisted living systems, enabling in-home activity monitoring of elderly people so that they can move freely without having to think about wearing sensors
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
