Optimal placement of an inertial sensor for fall and near-fall detection

 The world population is ageing and a key hazard to healthy ageing is falls. The consequences of falls can be costly to health and social care systems. Falls can be prevented by continuously monitoring of older people for near falls, as they are a major risk factor for falls. This preliminary study’s aim was to find the optimal placement of a monitoring device to detect falls, as this is the first step towards understanding how to detect a near fall. This study involved one participant wearing four commercially available motion trackers simultaneously.  The participant performed  five controlled sideways falls onto a crash mat. The motion trackers  were  controlled  using  the  associ-ated  software  that  also  logged  the  data.  The  results  presented  display  the ac-celerometer and gyroscope data for falls at the four locations  (wrist,  waist,  ankle,  and  thigh).  The  data  shows  monitoring  at  the  thigh  gives  the  most  consistent  pattern  per fall for both the accelerometer and gyroscope data.