Fall detection FPGA-based systems: A survey

Falls can lead to serious injuries, hospitalization and sometimes death, and are considered the number one cause of disabilities among elderly people, making falls a key concern in the healthcare sector. Advances in medical technology and healthcare mechanisms have driven the development of new responses to the healthcare needs of a growing elderly population. Ambulatory accelerometer devices have been applied to develop reliable and robust fall detection systems. This paper assesses fall detection systems using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) as a CPU in addition to data transmission. In this paper, we give a survey of the different fall detection systems based on FPGAs in the literature, definition of the main theoret ical points of fall detection accelerometers-based systems, existing techniques and algorithms and we give an overview of the main steps to design a fall detection system.