Falls in elderly have been recognized as a major health problem in an aging population. Physical activity patterns, circumstances leading to falls, and methods for recognizing body motion patterns inevitably resulting in falls are not well understood due to lack of sensors and wireless communication systems for continuous recording of data required for such analysis. Sensors that can be worn on the body, with access to both local data transmission and national communication networks, and which allow continuous monitoring of patients in accurate, convenient, unobtrusive and socially acceptable manner, need to developed. In this study, Sarcos will: 1) Design, prototype and test a research system for recording and wirelessly transmitting acceleration and body position data from ambulatory persons.2) Develop feature extraction and preliminary interpretive algorithms for characterizing accelerations and body positions during fall events. 3) Analyze issues related to connecting the proposed sensor and monitoring system into a national communication network to enable future development of a practical safety network for community living elderly persons. Sarcos staff has both the experience and technology developed during the DARPA sponsored Personnel Status Monitor project that enable to solve critical sensor and communication issues related to ambulatory monitoring of the elderly.
Potential commercial applications of this research include a range of Products such as pager-size monitors, operating via cellular paging networks, monitoring stations and services for nursing homes and research devices for studies of physical activity patterns in elderly population. Only the pager-monitor segment of this market is estimated, based on the number of potential users aged 65 yrs and older, at 270 mln dollars, and will grow as this group of population increases.
