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Assistive Smart Cane (ASCane) for Fall Detection: First Advances

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XV Mediterranean Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing – MEDICON 2019 (MEDICON 2019)

Part of the book series: IFMBE Proceedings ((IFMBE,volume 76))

Abstract

The development of fall detection systems with the capability of real-time monitoring is necessary considering that a large amount of people die and suffer severe consequences from falls. Due to their advantages, daily life accessories can be a solution to embed fall-related systems, and canes are no exception. In this paper, it is presented a cane with fall detection abilities. The ASCane is instrumented with an inertial sensor which data will be tested with three different fixed multi-threshold fall detection algorithms, one dynamic multi-threshold and machine learning methods from the literature. They were tested and modified to account the use of a cane. The best performance resulted in a sensitivity and specificity of 96.90% and 98.98%, respectively.

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Acknowledgment

This work is supported by the FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - with the scholarship reference PD/BD/141515/2018, with the reference project UID/EEA/04436/2013, by FEDER funds through the COMPETE 2020 - Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização (POCI) - with the reference project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006941.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for MicroEletroMechanical Systems (CMEMS), University of Minho, 4800-058, Guimarães, Portugal

    Pedro Mouta, Nuno Ferrete Ribeiro, Cristina P. Santos & Rui Moreira

Authors
  1. Pedro Mouta
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  2. Nuno Ferrete Ribeiro
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  3. Cristina P. Santos
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  4. Rui Moreira
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pedro Mouta .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    Jorge Henriques

  2. Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal

    Nuno Neves

  3. University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    Paulo de Carvalho

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Mouta, P., Ribeiro, N.F., Santos, C.P., Moreira, R. (2020). Assistive Smart Cane (ASCane) for Fall Detection: First Advances. In: Henriques, J., Neves, N., de Carvalho, P. (eds) XV Mediterranean Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing – MEDICON 2019. MEDICON 2019. IFMBE Proceedings, vol 76. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31635-8_204

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31635-8_204

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-31634-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-31635-8

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