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Implementation of proper and timely intervention to decrease the fall risk is
highly important and desirable. Following are some [24] of important fall avoidance /
prevention techniques:
Fall Avoidance Techniques
Technology advancement in the field of electrical instrument has resulted in different
reliable techniques to prevent fall. Some of the fall prevention techniques are given below:
(I) Intelligent Shoe System is designed to prevent slip during the walk using an enlarged
sole area up to 7 cm comprising a parallel link with a servo motor. The degree of sole area
changes with a real time analysis taken from the data acquisition system [24].
(II) Foot-Mat installed on the floor can be easily [25] applied at home. In foot mat, there is a
triaxial accelerometer that measures low-high frequency and vibration in three dimensional,
and a sensor that acts as a sensing resistor in the electrical circuit. Another advantage of
using foot mat is that it has data acquisition system.
2.6
Gait Parameters
As this thesis project is directly related to Fall Detection, so FoG, fall risk
assessment, postural instability and trembling of legs can also be included based on
interested features to extract from. Generally different parameters or features related to gait
have been described such as body velocity, time ratio, stride time and length, swing/stance
phases, maximum acceleration at toe-off etc. Different researchers try to include or exclude
different gait parameters depending upon their own specific requirements. However, the [26]
article describes different combinations of gait parameters in its own style under the category
of Gait Data.
Here, we try to present different gait parameters dividing into various categories. Some of
these are listed below:
2.6.1
Step related Parameters
All parameters related to feet such as step length and time, frequency, maximum acceleration
at toe-off or heel strike, an ankle swing rate and steps / unit time. A Sliding window method
is [27] generally used to periodically measure gait parameters in the real-time environment.
An algorithm based on Double Pendulum is employed to measure stride [28] length during
walking.
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