Intelligent Shoes for Detecting Blind Falls Using the Internet of Things

• Ahmad Abusukhon,

Vol. 17, No. 9, September 30, 2023
10.3837/tiis.2023.09.005, Download Paper (Free):

• Fall Detection
• flex sensor
• Internet of Things
• light sensor
• the 50Kg load scale sensor
• smart shoe
• Visually Impaired
• Machine Learning

Abstract

In our daily lives, we engage in a variety of tasks that rely on our senses, such as seeing. Blindness is the absence of the sense of vision. According to the World Health Organization, 2.2 billion people worldwide suffer from various forms of vision impairment. Unfortunately, blind people face a variety of indoor and outdoor challenges on a daily basis, limiting their mobility and preventing them from engaging in other activities. Blind people are very vulnerable to a variety of hazards, including falls. Various barriers, such as stairs, can cause a fall. The Internet of Things (IoT) is used to track falls and send a warning message to the blind caretakers. One of the gaps in the previous works is that they were unable to differentiate between falls true and false. Treating false falls as true falls results in many false alarms being sent to the blind caretakers and thus, they may reject the IoT system. As a means of bridging this chasm, this paper proposes an intelligent shoe that is able to precisely distinguish between false and true falls based on three sensors, namely, the load scale sensor, the light sensor, and the Flex sensor. The proposed IoT system is tested in an indoor environment for various scenarios of falls using four models of machine learning. The results from our system showed an accuracy of 0.96%. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our system is simpler and more accurate since it avoids sending false alarms to the blind caretakers.

Statistics

Cite this article