An engineering professor wants to take a form of radar detection for the military and apply it to the aging-in-place population. The goal is to develop a better way to identify more clearly whether someone has fallen and the level of risk and where in a living space they have fallen.
Villanova University professor Moeness Amin is the director of the Center for Advanced Communications in the college of engineering. In an interview with The Atlantic, he said radar monitoring in living spaces is appealing as an alternative to cameras because it improves privacy but it also could produce relevant information. It’s so sensitive, the technology can distinguish between the movement of a man, woman, child or dog inside a structure. The radar imaging device emits and receives frequencies that vary according to the way people move. The way those movements appear is called the Doppler Frequency Signature, according to the article.
The device would learn the way people move so it could distinguish between someone lying down on a bed and falling down, based on an algorithm.
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It will also distinguish between a “drop” fall from a heart attack and “tripping falls” because the radar imaging signature between the two falls is distinct, according to the article.
For people who use walkers or canes, their patterns will look different from people who don’t, and the system can learn to recognize them. “In the future, I think the radar is going to be like a companion, living with the person, learning about the habits of the person, the way he walks, the way he sits, the way he stands,” Amin said.
[Photo credit: Elderly Hand Holding Cane — Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis]
