Development of A Wearable Device for Fall Monitoring: A Preliminary Study

Falls among older adults are a significant public health issue, with 30% of older adults falling annually. The project's objective is to develop a fall detection system. This study aims to quantify postural sway (displacement) in older adults during 16 standardized activities of daily living (ADLs), creating a dataset to train an AI model to identify high-risk motion patterns in 50 older adults using a wrist-worn 6-axis motion sensor. The slow-walking group (4.34±1.01 s 10-meter walk test, 10MWT) exhibited greater movement displacements than the normal-walking group (3.48±0.71 s). In conclusion, the study validated that increased postural sway is directly associated with slow gait speed.