A Real-time Environmental Monitoring And Fall Protection Alarm System For The Elderly

As China’s population ages at a significantly faster rate,the number of empty nesters is also rising sharply.Children are burdened with the responsibility of providing for their families and are too busy with their own careers to take care of the elderly at home.Empty nesters in particular are very vulnerable to hazards caused by changes in the indoor and outdoor environment or air pollution in the absence of more care from their families.Older people often fall due to deterioration of their physical functions,which often leads to injuries such as bleeding,fractures,hospitalisation and even death.Environmental changes,air pollution and falls have a serious impact on the healthy lives of older people.Based on the above background,we developed a portable and wearable real-time environmental monitoring,positioning and fall prevention alarm system for the elderly,which mainly accomplished the following tasks.The hardware of the whole system was built.All hardware modules were designed and analysed and a filling device was formed using a built-in drive brushless motor and a CO2 cylinder with special air nozzles from Rayne USA.The hardware modules were integrated to reduce size and portability.A fall detection threshold algorithm was written.The acceleration,angular velocity and angular changes generated by a human fall are significantly different from normal everyday behavioural activities.A large dataset of human falls and everyday behavioural activities was collected through wireless transmission from the Wi Fi module.The entire human fall process takes a very short time,and the threshold information is combined with the short fall time to obtain a thresholdbased fall detection algorithm.The overall design and implementation of the system has been completed.The underlying hardware driver and functional encapsulation of all modules have been written and call interfaces have been provided to facilitate the main program to obtain data from each sensor.The porting of the MQTT(Message Queuing Telemetry Transport)communication protocol and the construction of each message buffer,as well as the configuration of the cloud environment,have been completed.Developed the web side system and APP with the help of Ali Cloud IOT Studio platform,debugged and completed the normal communication between the device side and the cloud server side.The device functionality was tested.The following experimental tests were completed to test and validate the system,mainly including alarm display and voice prompts when the environmental sensor data is out of the set range,voice prompts provided by the Web-side system and APP,historical travel track display and geo-fence crossing alarm,navigation finding of the device location,fall alarm and protection,and voice distress.