Citation

Habib MA, Mohktar MS, Kamaruzzaman SB, Lim KS, Pin TM, Ibrahim F. Sensors (Basel) 2014; 14(4): 7181-7208.

Affiliation

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. fatimah@um.edu.my.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/s140407181

PMID

24759116

Abstract

This paper presents a state-of-the-art survey of smartphone (SP)-based solutions for fall detection and prevention. Falls are considered as major health hazards for both the elderly and people with neurodegenerative diseases. To mitigate the adverse consequences of falling, a great deal of research has been conducted, mainly focused on two different approaches, namely, fall detection and fall prevention. Required hardware for both fall detection and prevention are also available in SPs. Consequently, researchers' interest in finding SP-based solutions has increased dramatically over recent years. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no published review on SP-based fall detection and prevention. Thus in this paper, we present the taxonomy for SP-based fall detection and prevention solutions and systematic comparisons of existing studies. We have also identified three challenges and three open issues for future research, after reviewing the existing articles. Our time series analysis demonstrates a trend towards the integration of external sensing units with SPs for improvement in usability of the systems.

Language: en