Ubiquitous mHealth Approach for Biofeedback Monitoring with Falls Detection Techniques and Falls Prevention Methodologies

Abstract

A mobile health application solution with biofeedback based on body sensors is very useful to perform a data collection for diagnosis in patients whose clinical conditions are not favorable. This system allows comfort, mobility, and efficiency in all the process of data collection providing more confidence and operability. Falls occurrence in senior people represents a high risk for their health and life. Those falls can cause fractures or injuries causing great dependence and debilitation to the elderly and even death in extreme cases. Falls can be detected by the accelerometer included in most of the available mobile devices. To reverse this tendency, it can be obtained more accurate data for patients monitoring from body sensors attached to the human body (such as, electrocardiogram, electromyography, blood volume pressure, electro dermal activity, or galvanic skin response). Then, this chapter reviews the related literature about this topic and introduces a mobile solution for falls prevention and detection, and biofeedback monitoring. The proposed system collects sensed data that is sent to a smartphone or tablet through Bluetooth. Mobile devices are used to process and display information graphically to users. The falls prevention system uses collected data from sensors in order to control and advice the patient (user) or even to give instructions to treat an abnormal condition to reduce the falls risk. In cases of symptoms even detect a possible disease. The signal processing algorithms plays a key role in the fall prevention system. In real time, these algorithms process the collected biofeedback data in order to extract relevant information from the signals and thereby warn the patient. Monitoring and processing data from sensors is realized by a smartphone that will send warnings to the user. All the process is performed in real time. The proposed system is evaluated, demonstrated, and validated through a prototype and it is ready for use.