Radar fall detection and breath rate under $40
seeedstudio.com
seeedstudio.com
But then he had a fall and couldn't get up. Anywhere else in the facility a staff member would have found him within five minutes. After a half hour and multiple failed attempts to stand he remembered his cell phone and called a Lodge member who took another twenty minutes to get there and help him up.
He didn't call me because he didn't want me to know he fell. But his Lodge buddy ratted him out to me and I was able to get him on a list for the first available room upstairs. A device like this could have alerted someone at the facility that he had fallen, this is a very big deal and it's going to save lives.
In some countries, elderly care facilities are being run by mob like organizations, as they are insanely profitable, draining the elders, their children and the government of funds simultaneously, while throwing PR to look like saints. Insane.
It's crazy, and I assume this business will boom further in the west with our ever increasing aging population. It'll be the new gold rush if it isn't there already.
The 6dof Gyroscope/Accelerometer sensors in most phones are perfectly adequate for the task.
It worked very well until it was removed from the Play Store a few years ago, but you can still find the APK floating around (https://apkfun.com/down_Fall-Detector.html) - although there are a lot more competing apps like this, it was actually one of the first to do reliable fall detection and reporting on Android ...
Main thing about Fall Detectors: TEST them. Really, really test them. You'd be surprised how well some algorithms work and how poorly they can perform if you do a 'slow fall', etc.
Obviously we could do this since phones had accelerometers, so I'm not sure if you read the the product description, but these radar sensors allow you to do fall detection WITHOUT having to clip a phone or any other sensor onto people.
Way, way more convenient and better for privacy. I can't imagine grandma will take her phone with her in her pijamas when she goes to the bathroom in the middle of the night, just to have her fall status sensed.
These sensors are a real game changer.
With the app: the user already has a cell phone, and doesn't need to buy anything else to get protected from falls. No proprietary hardware, just an app to install and he's safe. Plus, he'll always have his phone on him and can call/be called whenever deemed necessary by his caregivers.
There are no privacy implications whatsoever, because the app only reports to the people it is configured to report to - by SMS and Twitter, as well as local audio alerts.
BTW, I built this app for a company that had already developed hardware-based fall detectors, over ten years ago - this is not by any means a new market - which functioned perfectly every time (not needing mmWave) .. and which they determined were not popular because it required extra proprietary/special hardware, which most elderly in this market are suspicious of .. but given the choice to install a Fall Detector on their existing cell phone, which they carry around anyway as a safety net, was a no brainer ..
Do you always take your phone with you when you go to the bathroom half asleep in the middle of the night with no pockets in your pijamas?
I am sure my grandma does not do that and never will. Nor will she be ok with me belting a phone onto her at all times.
This idea is flawed by design from the get-go, which is why it never took off despite smartphones becoming ubiquitous.
You do if your life depends on it. Also, if your family has put a cell phone on your bathrobe specifically for the purpose - even doing this is cheaper than buying special hardware just because it has mmWave.
> Nor will she be ok with me belting a phone onto her at all times.
But belting proprietary, un-auditable electronics to her or installing it in her private space is okay, right ..
The Fall Detector/home medical metrics industry is huge, and plenty of people are using cell-phone based Fall Detectors to protect their family. This doesn't require mmWave, one bit.
You clearly don't know how stubborn (old) people can be even when it comes to their own safety. People should also wear bike helmets in my country, as their lives depends on it, yet few actually do. Moving the sensor off the people and onto the room removes this issue.
> Also, if your family has put a cell phone on your bathrobe specifically for the purpose
Nobody in my family wears bathrobes and I'm pretty sure almost nobody in my country does (BTW, is this a US thing?)
What if you forget to take your phone with you when you get out of bed for whatever reason? Or what if you fall out of bed before getting your smartphone? This is a flawed solution from the start.
>But belting proprietary electronics to her is okay, right ..
You clearly did not read the product description. You don't belt this sensor to the person you want to monitor but instead you install it in the room you're monitoring and the radar sensor detects when anyone in the room is falling down. That's the game changer right there.
Please read the product description and maybe you'll reconsider your stance.
Kind of an odd supposition, but okay .. I'm guessing you don't have much experience with the elderly and frail in care facilities, where it is pretty much policy to be robed when you get out of bed.
All of the elderly in my family (Europeans) use a robe when needed. Its not as 'rare' as you might think.
But fair enough, your point is that this mmWave-based fall detector doesn't need to be attached to the user. This means the end user is only going to be protected for as long as they are in the 'fall detection zone jail', alas. This is more of a prison than you might think - especially for elderly/care-needing individuals for whom mobility (outside, in a garden) is essential to their care and recovery .. wearing a device gives the individual far, far greater freedom over that of a 'zoned safety area' provided by a fixed-location installation ..
And for this reason, I simply don't agree that this mmWave thing is an improvement. It certainly is more convenient to care-givers, but its fixed-place requirement is a net loss for elderly/care.
Except my grandma is at her apartment and that's where I wish to monitor her but in a private and dignified way, not like cattle with an tracking bracelet, and she wears no bathrobe in her apartment either (Eastern Europe things).
>But fair enough, your point is that this mmWave-based fall detector doesn't need to be attached to the user.
It is not my point, it's literally in the article/product description, which you did not read, and is the whole selling point of this widget. Just stick it to the ceiling and it detects anyone falling in that room. Simple. No need for invasive tracking solutions attached to people at all times.
> This is more of a prison than you might think
This sensor does not stop you from going outside where grandma can take a phone in her purse and is also safe as there are always people around to call for help if anything would happen vs in her apartment where she is always alone.
The only claim I can agree with is an app-based fall sensor is a good option for people who already have mobile phones and don't trust external modules and would prefer to just use something they already have. You seem to have concluded this is widespread based on your users telling you they felt this way. You have to understand your users are not a random sample of all people at risk of falling. They're very obviously people who had mobile phones and thought something like this was a good enough idea to try.
Nope. It will never get deployed.
The problem is that when it fails, who is liable?
I've said it over and over, but the revolution in biomedical will happen when someone solves the problem of indemnity and not before.
Or these https://www.consumeraffairs.com/medical-alert-systems/fall-d...
Wearable fall detection devices are already a relativly crowded field. The liability doesn't seem to have been a show stopper yet.
I don't see why the non-wearable variety should face a substantially higher legal standard (although they do seem more technically challanging).
However, they blame the chip shortage for their own inability to manage their inventory.
I've had to cancel my last order (all items in stock and paid for at the time). I contacted them after a few weeks seeing the items were not yet shipped. They replied that some items were out of stock. I agreed to remove them. A couple of days later, they reply again that more items (similar sensor as the one featured here) are no longer in stock....
This tells me that that their website isn't showing the actual stock status at the time of order, that their system doesn't reserve quantities for items already purchased, and that they don't really communicate unless you chase them (but they respond quickly).
If you purchase anything, have a follow-up ticket within 3 days to make sure they take care of your order and quickly assert whether all parts are available.
I like Seedstudio but they need to sort out their logistics and inventory management. My previous order took 4 months to ship and had multiple shortages and delays as well.
DFWS (Device-Free Wireless Sensing) is possible with low-cost ESP32 devices and custom firmware, https://academic.oup.com/jcde/article/7/5/644/5837600
802.11bf WiFi Sensing is scheduled to be part of WiFi 7 in 2024, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901587
You had me worried, but not yet it can't. From the article:
> built-in health monitoring using radar technology
It is a Wifi bulb with radar.
The journal article implies it is possible, but they didn't demonstrate any applications, just some characteristics of the ESP platform that may enable it.
The only radios in the bulb are Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. By "radar technology" they mean doppler shift in Wi-Fi radio reflections. They could be using something like Qualcomm's 60Ghz 802.11ay WiFi radio, but that is probably expensive, https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2018/10/16/qualcomm-d....
https://us.sengled.com/blogs/news/the-biggest-ces-2022-smart...
> We earned this year’s award for a product targeted to launch in the fourth quarter: our Smart Health Monitoring Light. Featuring a Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Mesh dual chip, the bulb will provide a number of features, including biometric measurement tracking of heart rate, body temperature, and other vital signs, as well as sleep tracking. By connecting multiple bulbs via Bluetooth Mesh and creating a virtual map across your home, this product can even help detect human behavior and determine if someone has fallen and then send for help.
> The journal article implies it is possible, but they didn't demonstrate any applications, just some characteristics of the ESP platform that may enable it
There's been a decade of research in Wi-Fi (2.4/5Ghz) sensing of human activity, e.g. here are 400+ research papers with steady improvement in detection techniques, https://dhalperi.github.io/linux-80211n-csitool/#external. From that list, a 2017 paper on respiration detection, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8210837
> Wi-Fi based respiration detection technique has attracted much attention due to its device-free and low-deployment-cost. However, most existing studies focus on respiration detection in experimental environments, without considering the impact of people around (it often occurs in our daily life), therefore, if there are several people in the system, their detection will fail. To address this open issue, we propose TinySense, a novel approach that can detect multiple persons' respiration at a time.
https://theverge.com/2022/1/1/22862543/apple-watch-911-ad-fe...
It's sad to see how all of this tech is just doing one thing: enabling badly run "care homes" to reduce staffing count even further, and generally covering up the fact that we as a society are failing our elders.
Ideally, assuming there's no need for qualified special care like with dementia people should be able to live out their old days with their family, in their neighborhood. Not being shunted off to a senior citizen's prison in the outskirts and warded over by technology, because the kids have to move across the world to be exploited by capitalism and quality care with proper staffing is all but unaffordable for the 99%.
I agree, apps like yours or the radar piece of tech we're talking about here are a massive gain in quality of life for senior citizens who live on their own or together with their family... but let's be real: that's the utter minority where these devices will be used.
I think the mmWave thing can and probably will be used to reduce staff in care facilities - but this is why apps that are freely available for use with commodity hardware will always have a market, too.
One end of the stick: care facilities optimizing for profit - the other end, families who simply want their loved ones to be taken care of, if they fall while taking a daily walk for health.
Having already shipped a fall detector in both hardware and software form into this market (over a decade ago), I can tell you there are far more families taking care of their loved ones with this technology, than there are commercial (capitalist) elderly-exploitation facilities...
The product looks to be available currently on Amazon in the US: https://www.amazon.com/ResMed-S-Personal-Sleep-Solution/dp/B...
Are there a superior competing product(s) now? Why was support for this product discontinued?
This is ridiculously naïve. Gait recognition is a thing. Who knows what other kind of analysis can be done using point cloud and velocity vectors.
Do you have a link?
Anybody know what they mean by "the standard algorithm" for fall detection?
I would buy the "Human Static Presence Module" in a second if there was a tutorial on how to set it up (code wise). The YT video linked on the page made me way more curious then I thought I'd be.
I think they may have used the wrong prefix haha