Ambient assisted living systems for falls monitoring at home

Introduction: Monitoring systems at home are critical in the event of a fall, and can range from standalone fall detection devices to activity recognition devices that aim to identify behaviors in which the user may be at risk of falling, or to detect falls in real-time and alert emergency personnel. Areas covered: This review analyzes the current literature concerning the different devices available for home fall detection. Expert opinion: Included studies highlight how fall detection at home is an important challenge both from a clinical-assistance point of view and from a technical-bioengineering point of view. There are wearable, non-wearable and hybrid systems that aim to detect falls that occur in the patient’s home. In the near future, a greater probability of predicting falls is expected thanks to an improvement in technologies together with the prediction ability of machine learning algorithms. Fall prevention must involve the clinician with a person-centered approach, low cost and minimally invasive technologies able to evaluate the movement of patients and machine learning algorithms able to make an accurate prediction of the fall event.