A Portable Continuous Wave Radar System to Detect Elderly Fall

Abstract

Fall is the leading cause of death among elderly people worldwide. In this work a low power portable continuous wave radar (CWR) system is proposed to detect elderly fall. This paper presents experimental evaluation of the system to detect human fall motion among various sitting, standing and walking activities. Signals from three subjects with different heights and weights engaged with the different movement activities including walking, sitting, standing and fall in front of the proposed radar system are analyzed. Overall, 60 fall and 180 non-fall activities were recorded. The Short-time Fourier Transform (STFT) is employed to obtain time-frequency Doppler signatures of different human activities. Radar data is analysed by using MATLAB and an algorithm is employed to classify the fall on the basis of analysed data. The results show that the proposed portable CWR can be used to detect fall from non-fall activities with almost 100% accuracy.