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Wheelchair Personfalldetection
Wheelchair Personfalldetection
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Chandrasekharan Nataraj
Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation
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Abstract— Falling down is among the major causes of medical problem that are faced by the elderly people
and movement disability person. These people tend to injure themselves from falling down when they alone.
When a falling event occurred, medical attention needs to provide immediately in order to reduce the risk of
faller from getting severe injuries which may lead to death. Several technologies have been developed which
some utilized webcams to monitor their activities. However, the cost of operation and installation is
expensive and only applicable for indoor environment. Some user also worried about their privacy issues.
Current commercialized device is by wearing a wearable wireless emergency transmitter which restrict
movement of user and produce high false alarm. This research proposed a wheelchair-person fall detection
system with IoT which is cost effective and reliable to detect fall and alert surrounding to call for help. For
fall detection, gyroscope, GPS module, FSR pressure sensor and microcontroller are implemented into the
system. The gyroscope is use to detect the position of the wheelchair while the FSR pressure sensor which
placed on the sit pad of the wheelchair will be used to detect and recognized the gesture of the user. Both
works together to detect fall event which increase the accuracy of the fall detection. GPS module used to
allocate the location of the wheelchair when fall event occur. When fall event occur, all the data includes the
location of the wheelchair will be sent to blynk mobile application. The IoT system will sent email
notification to the registered person to alert them fall event happen and help needed. Moreover, this system
requires less implementation cost and provides a quick response. It can install in the existing commercial
wheelchair. However, the limitation of this system is it required a good WIFI connection. For future
recommendation, a better GUI design can be implemented into the system besides that, more detection
system can be added on to increase the accuracy of the system.
Keywords- Sensor, Microcontroller, Wheelchair, Fall detection, Internet of Things
I. INTRODUCTION
Every country in the world was focusing on developing their nation which includes growing the
country’s population. The number of increasing of population lead increasing number of older people and
health issue people. With increasing number of these people, the demand of healthcare service increases
rapidly. These people who have health issue or elderly people usually does not have enough strength to
walk thus, wheelchair will be used. For those who used wheelchair but live independently are exposed to
higher risk of falls. Besides that, falling down frequently may cause psychological and physiological
damage that lead to severe injury and even death if medical attention is not provided immediately.
In order to reduce the risk of these people getting harm from fall, medical attention needs to be
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provided immediately. Therefore, a reliable fall detection system can help to detect fall in elderly people
and search for help and support. Nowadays, there are two type of wheelchair which are commercial and
smart or powered wheelchair. Commercial wheelchair is the normally wheelchair which does not have
any technology on it, and it is mostly worldwide used. Smart or powered wheelchair consists of controller
unit which allows the user to provide input information through joystick, voice command and so on, so
that the wheelchair can automatically move to the destination. Usually smart or powered wheelchair is
less used in normal family or medical facilities due to its high price. Thus, new system which can detect
fall event need to be designed to be implement in the worldwide used commercial wheelchair with cost
efficient.
Elderly people and the disability people are the one who mostly use wheelchair in their daily life.
These people have a high risk of falling and injured themselves. Falling down and become unconscious
can be fatal because nobody is aware of this this happen event themselves. If these people are live alone
or their family not around, it may lead the faller to have more severe injuries. It is important to have a
quick response and rescue time if falling event occurs.
[3] conducted a research on possible cause and consequences of elderly falls and method to overcome
it. In this research, several approaches have been taken toward fall detection by using engineering
practice. Several attempts have been made to monitor toward user ‘s daily activities to determine fall
potential and try to prevent it accordingly. The researcher also promotes weight-sensitive reverse pressure
pads to solve the problem. Weight-sensitive reverse pressure pads will be put on the bed, chair or
wheelchair. The pad will be trigger when it connected to the fall monitor. It also can connect to the
wireless monitor and a signal to the central monitor unit informing the caregiver of the active pad. This
system has a huge drawback which related to maintenance. In the past decades, the booming information
technology (such as the Internet of things, cloud computing and big data analytics) has started to change
the world [4-5-19].
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[6] In this research, Wheelchair can be categories into 3 categories which are past, present and future.
Wheelchair which falls into past category such as haptic feedback, voice recognition, collision avoidance
wheelchair and so on. Present wheelchair such as cloud computing, computer vision, touch screen,
following, mapping and so on. The implement of IoT had enhance the smart wheelchair since the data
collected from the sensor will be sent to the cloud and will be analysis. The analyzed data will be sent
back to the smart wheelchair and integrate with the system and causes the system to take action based on
the data and improve the performance of the wheelchair. The latest technology that had been implemented
with IoT such as machine learning, following, localization and mapping, navigation assistance and fall
detection.
[7] proposed a system design where the wheelchair was controlled by human by using touch screen.
This system was used for the smart wheelchair because it was user friendly technology that operates
through touch screen. This system includes 2 modes of operation which are manual and auto mode. In
manual mode, touch screen is used to interact with the wheelchair. An auto mode enables the patient to
navigate their indoor movement with the pre-defined path that had been set in the system. IR sensor also
been implemented for obstacle detection. The wheelchair also consists of wireless communication for
emergency.
The smart assistance system that had been developed by [8] for the wheelchair user can detect whether
the user has fallen so that he or she can be help on time. The system was cooroperate with IoT.
Accelerometer and gyroscope sensor is used to detect movement of a person. The system also included air
quality checking sensor. These systems will be mounted on the wheelchair arm for fall detection. IoT
system is used to continuously monitoring the condition of the wheelchair user. A thershold value had
been set in the microcontroller. The function of the IoT is to reduce the work of users as well as it
provides efficient besides human work effort will be reduce. The system was user friendly, low budget as
the wheelchair used was manually wheelchair and time saving since all the work excuted automatically.
Nowadays, powered wheelchair with joystick unable to be used by many people especially people with
no hand.
Thus [9] came out with an idea of voice operated smart wheelchair. A voice-controlled wheelchair
suitable to be use for a physical disabled person especially the hands. The control of the wheelchair
depends on the motor control and drive system and DC Motor. Once the system recognizes and compared
the voice command with the pre-stored memory, the generated digital signal would be sent to the
processor to controls the wheelchair accordingly. The objectives of the research are to enhance the
powered wheelchair by using voice recognition system. A lot of sensors will be used to detect the
surrounding and a speech interface to translate commands.
[10] proposed a new system for wheelchair which based on android phone-controlled wheelchair along
with the use of manual joystick. The goal of the system is to help those who are physical disabled person.
This wheelchair mainly designs for medical department. The user can also control this wheelchair through
joystick. The objective of the smart wheelchair is to allow disabled people to move freely. Besides that,
since the wheelchair can be asset for medical usage, it had the system which that the user can monitor and
check the health condition of the user through his or her android app.
[11] proposed Intelligent wheelchair based on (IoT). The proposed intelligent wheelchair can be
control by touch screen android gadget. With assistance of GPS, location of the wheelchair can be
determined. The live streaming module also can be helpful to track wheelchair. Obstacle avoiding
subsystem is used to avoid any obstacle from the pre-set map. The system work as the range or reading of
the sensor that will be used will be set to determine a pre-chosen distance between the object and the
wheelchair to avoid collision. For the emergency monitoring and location monitoring subsystem, the
module is executed with accelerometer placed on the microcontroller. An accelerometer is connected with
GSM and GPS. Variable is utilized to store initial estimation of accelerometer as A set of value will be set
as threshold value for the accelerometer. [12] proposed an IoT based system to detect a person or
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wheelchair fall, the system is equipped with sensor that monitors the vital senses of the person and reports
constantly.
[13] Any abrupt or sudden changes in these values are taken as an anomaly and reported. The system
makes use of the following sensors such as gyro meter, an accelerometer and a load sensor in the case of
wheelchair. These sensors measure the orientation of the person, their speed and their weight. These
sensors are calibrated under standard conditions and when a person falls down, and a threshold is
determined. The major stumbling block is to identify the sensor and their integration since different
medical condition may require different sensors. Besides that, a lot of testing needs to be conducted to
find the suitable threshold value for these sensors.
[14] proposed an idea about approaches towards future IoT based person/wheelchair fall detection, the
system use accelerometer and gyro sensor to detect person movements. It will be mounted on person’s
hand or wheelchair arm. The sensor will be connected with the microcontroller such as Arduino or
raspberry. The system will constantly keep monitoring for fall detection by getting reading from the
sensor. When there is a sudden change of the reading depend on the threshold value that had been set, an
alert will be trigger. A snooze system will be added to stop the alert system since they maybe a false fall
and the system will detect and treat as a real fall and trigger the alert system.
[15] conducted a study on human fall detection system: Daily Activity Classification and Sensing
Techniques. Human fall detection system used to identify unintentional fall. This this research, they had
introduced several methods to detect human fall such as camera or vision-based system, wearable device-
based system and fusion-based system. For wearable device-based system, it can divide into 2 types
which are inactivity based and posture based. The user will wear devices with sensor on it to detect
posture and motion of the user. The sensor used are such as accelerometer, posture sensor and so on.
Figure 3. illustrates the FSR402 Round Pressure Force Sensitive Resistor Sensor system; it consists of 9
sensors which will be placed in a 3 x 3 pattern on the sit pad of the wheelchair. When the user sits on the
wheelchair and clicks on the start button, the Round Pressure Force Sensitive Resistor Sensor will trigger
all 9 of them at once. The Round Pressure Force Sensitive Resistor Sensor will be code as trigger on and
trigger off (0 or 1). When the user attempt to stand up and leave the wheelchair, the sensor which already
triggers on will be trigger off based on the pattern of the user stand up. The condition for alert the fall
detection is when the first row and second row of the sensors trigger off. When the first row of the sensor
triggers off, but other rows still triggers on, the fall detection alarm will not be trigger. When both first
row and second row of the sensors trigger off, the fall detection alarm will be trigger. If the user
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accidently stands up and not fall off, the user can push the snooze button within 5 seconds to turn off the
alarm. If the user does not push the snooze button, the buzzer will turn on and alert the surrounding.
GPS system of the smart wheelchair will send its location into the IoT platform and the GSM module
will call and search for help. The registered person can identify the location of the wheelchair through the
IoT platform since the IoT platform consists the location information of the wheelchair.
32 module to the blynk mobile application for visualization display and sent notification when fall
detected.
FIGURE 4. Modified Overall Block Diagram for Wheelchair Fall Detection System
Figure 5. shows the overall wiring diagram of the wheelchair fall detection system. The system
consists of 3 individual parts of system which integrate together to perform a whole fall detection system.
The 3 individual parts of the system were gesture recognition system located on the sit pad of the
wheelchair, a gyroscope detection system and a GPS detection system. The following wiring diagram is
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The FSR pressure sensors are stick on the sitting area of the wheelchair. The GPS, gyroscope and
buzzer are stick on the inner left-hand side of the wheelchair. All the sensors are connected to the
breadboard. When a person is sitting on the wheelchair, the sensor will be trigger on. The GPS will detect
the location of the wheelchair and gyroscope will detect the position of the wheelchair.
All the data will be sent to the blynk mobile application. The user and the registered person can
observe the situation of the wheelchair and its location. The system operated when the microcontroller is
powered with a 10000mAh power bank. The system MUST connect with mobile data or WIFI to ensure
the system run smoothly.
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Blynk is a hardware-agnostic IoT platform with white-label mobile apps, private clouds, device
management, data analytics, and machine learning. [16] Figure 7. shows the GUI design of the
Wheelchair Fall Detection Mobile Application.
The GUI consist of 3 main functions which are the google map, email notification and the virtual LED
light. When the data collected and sent to the mobile application, it will be analysis and display its result
instantly. The data collected from the GPS system will allow the google map in the application to show
the current location of the wheelchair. When the value detected by the gyroscope sensor exceed the
threshold that had been set and when the pattern of the pressure sensor detected different with what had
been set, it will trigger as a fall detection. The virtual LED in the application will be trigger on and an
email will be sent to the registered email address to indicate that the wheelchair’s user had fall from the
wheelchair.
to conduct testing with the help of stopwatch. There were 3 things that will be recorded which were
response time for the GPS system, FSR pressure sensor with email notification and gyroscope sensor with
email notification.
As shown in Figure 11., the GPS System had the lowest delay time of 1 seconds. This is because the
GPS system only request data from the satellite once and direct sent the data toward the GUI system
which does not affect the delay much. For FSR pressure sensor with email notification and gyroscope
sensor with email notification, it has an average delay of 3 seconds and 9 seconds.
VI. 5. CONCLUSION
The first objectives were successfully designed and achieved in chapter 4. In the system
implementation section, the finalized flowchart and block diagram had been done. After designing the
circuit for the whole system and the programming for each sub-system. The gesture recognition method
had been implemented by installing the pressure sensor on the sit pad of the wheelchair. Besides that, the
gyroscope sensor also been implemented inside the wheelchair. Both systems to detect fall from the
wheelchair. When either system detect a fall happen, the alert system will be trigger. The buzzer will turn
on and the data obtained will be analysed and sent to the IoT platform. The second and third objective had
been achieved by using the blynk mobile application. When fall detected, the analysed data will be sent to
the blynk mobile application to further analysis. The data obtain will be perform in the GUI layout that
had been designed. The data obtained from the GPS module will present as google map in the blynk
application. The alert system will be present as a virtual LED. An email will be sent when the virtual LED
turn on which indicate fall detect. The person who received the email can open the app and determine the
situation of the wheelchair by observe the virtual LED still on or not. If still on mean fall really detect due
to there is a secure button in the system which the user can click the button to turn off the alert system if
false fall event detect. The google map used to identify location of the wheelchair.
VII. REFERENCES
[1] Vishwakarma, S. K., 2017. Development of smart wheelchair, Dehradun: Dit University,.
[2] Isreal, A., 2014. System and Method for fall prevention and detection. United State, Patent No. US
8866620 B2.
[3] El-Bendary, N., Tan, Q., Pivot, F. C. & Lam, A., 2013. Fall detection and prevention for the elderly.
International Journal on Smart Sensing and Intelligent System, 6(3), pp. 1230-1266.
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