falla

Falls frequently afflict the elderly population, emerging as the primary cause of mortality among individuals aged 79 years and above and ranking as the second leading contributor to unintentional injury fatalities across all age groups.

This automatic fall detection system assumes paramount importance within the living environment of older adults.

Falla is a simple, cost-effective, DIY build that anyone can design to get notified of a fall event instantly.

Materials Used

• 1 Atmega328pu (Processor)
• 1 Esp01 (WI-FI Module)
• 1 Mpu6050 (IMU)
• 1 3.7v Lipo Battery
• 1 Wooden Prototyping PCB
• 2 22nF Capacitor
• 1 16Mhz Ceramic Oscillator
• 3 4.7k Resistors (for PullUp)

System Design

System Diagram of Falla

The power supply unit consists of a small 3.7v lipo battery. It was chosen for its compactness and current capacity to handle the electric current burst that arises when the Esp01 Wi-Fi module tries to transmit information over the internet to prevent the system from restarting.

The sensor unit contains the Mpu6050 Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). You can combine the acceleration and angular orientation data to accurately detect falls however, this project only uses the accelerometer to detect falls if the acceleration of the fall surpasses a certain threshold.

To process incoming raw sensor data, the Atmega328pu is clocked at 16Mhz to adequately read and process rapidly changing IMU data.

Once the threshold is surpassed (a fall is detected), the Atmega328pu processor triggers an external interrupt event on the alert unit (Esp01 Wi-Fi module) to trigger an IFTTT event that sends an alert to a designated mail. This interrupt occurs when GPIO 1 on the ESP01 is pulled low (falling edge) from its normal high state, and it can only be triggered by a fall outcome processed by the Atmega328pu processor.

Of the 3 PullUp resistors, one is used to pull the rest pin of the Atmega328pu Microcontroller Unit (MCU) to prevent it from restarting while the remaining two are used in the I2C communication medium between the Mpu6050 (Slave) and the Atmega328pu MCU (Master) to pull the communication line of the Master high.

Circuit Diagram of the Falla

Preview

IFTTT Setup

Mail of a detected fall occurrence

3D Design of the Falla's enclosing

Inside Falla's hardware

Recommendations

To improve on this project, the following recommendations should be considered:

• Improve the compactness of the hardware
• Combine the accelerometer and gyro data to improve accuracy