A Real-Time Fall Detection System in Elderly Care Using Mobile Robot and Kinect Sensor

The growing population of elderly people especially in developed countries motivates the researchers to develop healthcare systems to ensure the safety of elderly people at home. On the other hand, mobile robots can provide an efficient solution to healthcare problem. Moreover, using new technologies such as the Kinect sensor with robotics could bring new ways to build intelligent systems that could use to monitor the elderly people, and raise an alarm in case of dangerous events, such as falling down, are detected. Falls and their consequences are a major risk especially for elderly people who live alone where immediate assistance is needed. In this work, the Kinect sensor is used to introduce a mobile robot system to follow a person and detect when the target person has fallen. In addition, the mobile robot is provided with a cell phone that is used to send an SMS message notification and make an emergency call when a fall is detected.