Design of a Mixed Signal Fall Detector System based on a Single 3-D Accelerometer with Dual Mode Physiological Signal Readouts for Stand-Alone Wearable Applications

Abstract

Fall detection technologies kept on advancing to provide better prediction ability, portability and wearability. Existing fallrelated studies include vision-based systems and wearable devices. Though there is already abundant work in the wearable technology space, there is still innovation in making such devices autonomous or standalone. Furthermore, such device could have more functionality embedded to it in one silicon. This served to be the motivation of this work as it attempts to develop a mixed signal system that is fairly stand-alone in terms of fall detection while providing a front-end for heart rate, mean arterial pressure and temperature at post fall condition with inactivity log. For fall detection, a combination of magnitude and spike windowing and thresholding are utilized for a more robust detection. This circuit has been designed using TSMC 0.18um technology obtained from MOSIS wafer test runs and was verified using SPICE.