Distributed and Portable Fall Detection Using Wireless Body Area Network at Nursing Home

This paper introduces a distributed and portable fall detection system targeted for residents living in nursing homes. Various scenarios are provided and whole system design scheme is illustrated. Fall detection can be performed either at the server end or at the sensor node. Compared to fall detection at server side, the in-node intelligence enables local fall detection and greatly reduces the communication between the nodes and the server. Consequently, it also greatly reduces power consumption by reducing communications which are not crucial. Since sensor nodes usually use battery as power source, the transmission of features significantly improves the performance of the whole system in terms of the battery life (2.3 times longer in our experiments). Some experimental results are also given which verify the performance of the system. The system provides a good paradigm for fall detection applications using wireless area body network (WBAN).