The social activities of the elderly have been increasing as our society progresses toward an aging society. As their activities increase, the occurrence of falls that could lead to fractures as increase. Outcomes from falls are serious health hazards...
The social activities of the elderly have been increasing as our society progresses toward an aging society. As their activities increase, the occurrence of falls that could lead to fractures as increase. Outcomes from falls are serious health hazards to the elderly that can lead to bed arrest and eventual fatality. Therefore, we need more thorough understanding of falls including the progress of falls and the impact area.
Many of the traditional methods of falls research dealt with voluntary falls by younger subject since older subject can easily get fracture from any voluntary falls. So, it is too complicated to get exact data about falls of the elderly.
Here, we tried to capture the characteristics of the movements of major joints during falls experiments using three dimensional motion capture system with a moving mattress that can safely induce unexpected falls. Healthy younger subjects participated in the actual falls experiment and the moving mattress was actuated by a pneumatic system. The kinematic parameters such as velocities and accelerations of major segments were imported to a computer simulation environment and falls to hard surfaces were simulated in a computational environment using a realistic human model of aged persons. The simulation was able to give approximations to contact forces which can occur during actual falls.
And we also development of a device that can detect fall and prevent fractures. This device consists of fall detection system and air bag system. The fall detection system can detect falls with 3-axis acceleration sensor and the air bag system can prevent fracture by a expansion equipment with a CO2 bombe and a solenoid valve. This result shows that the variations of velocity and acceleration during fall are very important factors and the characterization of fall is useful in the fall detection and this equipment is also useful in the prevention of fracture.