Meet
CareFall!
Personal
Monitoring For Seniors
​
CareFall Monitoring Device was recognized and awarded at the Alameda County Science and Engineering Fair 2021.
"Great work! Highly impressed by your technical knowledge and demonstrated innovation in this project. You put together a complex, fully-functional prototype involving all these different HW + SW technologies working together, and presented your findings beautifully!
You have a potentially very interesting problem space that is focused on fall detection and prevention. In particular your ideas around building a machine learning model for fall prevention could be very beneficial."
- Panel of Judges
It was an amazing experience presenting my CareFall Monitoring Device at IoT London. I am so grateful to Dominie Roberts for the opportunity and all the great feedback, encouragement and support received. Here is the link to full recording: https://lnkd.in/d-EUCxp​
Passcode: #hC3xwj2
CareFall is here to protect you and alert your emergency contacts in the event of a fall.
FEATURES
Emergency Button
Emergency button on the side of the CareFall device, when help is needed.
Push Notification
Once the emergency contacts are established, an instant alert will sent autonomously when help is needed.
WiFi Technology
Connect the wearable to WiFi, and CareFall will be connected and ready to use!
CAREFALL
THE BEGINNING OF CAREFALL
Today there is a serious problem that many elderly people are unable to obtain immediate help when experiencing a fall. My grandmother in India has had several falls over the past 5 years leading to a surgery at 91. This has resulted in severe disruption in our family lives. This motivated me to engage in a remote research internship in collaboration with Jayeeta Chowdhury, Program Director at India Health Fund, a Tata Trusts Initiative. My public health literature review was on - Using Technology to Address Falls And Risk Factors Impacting The Elderly In India .
​
I hypothesized that through a combination of heart rate and accelerometer sensors, a mobile application, and Wi-Fi technology, I could create a prototype of a wearable device that could autonomously determine a fall and send immediate alerts to caretakers. I decided to build a proof of concept and prototype based on such principles.
TECHNOLOGY
To build this project, I used an Arduino micro-controller and Wi-Fi module. The Arduino will use the values from the connected heart rate sensor and accelerometer to send text or Push Notifications to the desired contacts if a fall was detected. To set up the device, the caretaker would need to use the application to enter contact information and emergency contacts if a fall occurs. Through Angular.js, PHP, and mySQL, I created a web application that the caretaker can use to monitor the user’s heart rate, location, and other metrics. The elderly person would then wear the lightweight device throughout the day. If they ever need immediate help, they can also press the button located on the wearable to contact the caretaker (or other emergency contacts).
​
I implemented a new feature related to contact tracing using Python based APIs to store and retrieve the sensor data. During the COVID 19 pandemic, senior centers have been the hotspot for multiple outbreaks. The elderly population is at greater risk of serious illness from this disease and it’s worse for them if they have conditions like asthma and heart disease. Through the web application, the caretaker can track other contacts who may have been within the vicinity of the infected user.
FUTURE
In the future, I plan to use more and improved sensors to create an accurate and precise wearable. Using the historical sensor data and it's patterns, I plan to build analytics and pro-active fault predictions. I hope to learn how to utilize statistical or machine learning techniques to build models so we can predict future fall trends or patterns in data.