Optimal accelerometer placement for fall detection of rehabilitation patients

The development of health monitoring system using wearable sensor has lots of potential in the field of rehabilitation and gained lots of attention in the scientific community and industry. The aim and motivation in this field are to focus on the application of wearable technology to monitor elderly or rehab patients in home-based settings to reduce resources and development cost. The wearable sensor such as accelerometer used to emphasise the clinical applications of fall detection during rehabilitation treatment. This paper is intended to determine the optimal sensor placement especially for lower limb activity during rehabilitation exercise. Accelerometer data were collected from three different body locations (hip, thigh, and foot). The lower limb activities involve normal movements such as walking, lifting, sit-to-stand, and stairs. Other unexpected activity such as falls might occur during normal lower limb exercise movement. Then, acceleration data for various lower limbs activities was classified using k-NN and SVM classifier. The result found that the hip was the best location to record data for lower limb activities including when fall occurs.