Hip Injury Prevention For Elderly (HIPE)

Abstract

Falling is the second leading cause of accidental deaths worldwide and is a major cause of injury, especially for the elderly. Reasons such as dementia, balance disorders and gait disorders make the elderly more susceptible to accidental falls. Despite all this, there is still no definite way to prevent injuries caused due to accidental falls in an effective and harmless manner. Our project, HIPE (Hip Injury Prevention for Elderly), comprises of a special safety jacket to cushion accidental falls thus making them harmless. The jacket has several small inflatable airbags attached to its back, side and front. An event of falling is detected by a smartphone placed in patient’s trousers. This is done using a mobile application which is designed to read accelerometers’ data from smartphone and apply it to an Adaboost trained machine learning model for detection. Smartphone sends a distress signal via Bluetooth and deploys airbags which cushion the fall thus making the fall harmless.