A new approach to improve the fall detection in elderly: monitoring of the autonomic nervous system activation

摘要

Nowadays, the proportion of elderly is increasing. As many of them live alone, their health problems and accidents are often not reported. Falling is one of the most significant problems and in some reported cases, detectors have been used, based on accelerometers.The present work is based On the study of the Autonomous Nervous System's (ANS) behavior during a fall, measured in terms of the skin's electrical resistance and the heart rate. We studied the ANS's reaction of 10 young subjects during simulated falls.We measured the electrodermal response and the heart rate variability, computing the power spectral density of the latter in order to extract the signal's energies in the LF and HF bands. We also used the Poincare Plot representation to quantify of this reaction.