# Design of a Wearable Healthcare Emergency Detection Device for Elder Persons
## 1 Introduction  
Among the leading causes of severe harm and death in the elderly, there is the problem of falls at home. Lack of balance, sudden lurching and confusion after getting out of bed cause much mortality and bedriddenness. The effect is greatest in patients with dementia, who often receive harm that limits their mobility, forcing them to spend the rest of their lives bedridden or in assisted living residences.  
According to the best statistics available, in Italy, people over 65 years of age fall at least once during the year. Of these, 43% fall more than once, and of these falls, over 60% occur at home. A large portion of those who fall are seniors with dementia. The bedroom accounts for as many as 25% of total falls. In the United States, falls are the leading cause of unintentional death and the 7 th leading cause of death in persons aged \(\geq\)65 years. In 2018, there were 32,522 fall-related deaths of people \(\geq\)65 and only 4933 fall-related deaths of people younger than 65; thus, 85% of fall-related deaths occur in the 13% of the population who are \(\geq\)65 [1].  
How a person falls will dictate the types of injuries that may result. For example, falling forward or backwards, striking the hand first as an unconditional reflex, usually causes a wrist fracture. Instead, a rupture of the hip is characteristic of falls to one side or the other. When an older adult suddenly gets out of bed, their or her body needs time to restore balance and cope with the new situation.  
The main problem is not the fall and the fracture, but its consequences. In fact, in the elderly, pathologies such as osteoporosis and other physiological changes related to ageing cause slower healing, additional discomfort and effects from the psychological point of view. Many elderly patients are reluctant to report falling because they view falling as part of the ageing process or fear being restricted in their activities or hospitalised.  
Falls can impair the independence of older adults and cause a range of personal and socioeconomic consequences. In fact, falls were responsible for more than 3 million emergency department visits by older persons. Medical expenditures for nonfatal fall injuries were approximately $50 billion in 2019 and are sure to increase [2]. However,clinicians often underestimate the damage from a fall unless the patient has an obvious injury, as history and objective examination usually do not include detailed assessments.  
Anyone who lives with, helps or works with seniors, particularly those with illnesses, knows how difficult it is to get them to listen to and follow the suggestions and directions they are given. Therefore, we designed a wearable emergency recognition device for elder persons with the aim of detecting dangerous events, such as falls, in order to trigger assistance. In our case study, we used patients with metabolic disorders, who are more likely to be prone to falls.  
The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 reports a discussion of related works on the fall detection topic. In Section 3, we describe our fall detection system and its constituent components. In Section 4, the experimental results and evaluation are presented. Lastly, conclusions and future work are described in Section 5.