Design and assessment of a real-time aceelerometer-based lying-to-sit sensing system for bed fall prevention

Bed falling is an important issue to the hospital. However, it seems that using bedrail restraints or bed alarm systems cannot succeed in preventing bed falls in hospital. Moreover, the bed alarm systems are too expensive for individuals who choose to rest at home due to lack of medical care resource nowadays. In this work, we design a low cost and real-time lying-to-sit sensing system with accelerometer attached on the chest. The system implements a proposed intelligent and low complexity tilt sensing algorithm to calculate the tilting angle of the upper body in real-time and standalone fashion. It can detect those people with high falling-risk when trying to sit up or getting out of beds and send alarms to medical care personnel. Such that, they can receive appropriate care and support immediately. As a result, the bed falls can be prevented on those people.