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Top1. Introduction
The percentage of the elder population over and above the age of 60 is increasing a lot and this will continue to increase for another 20 years (WPO, 2019). In the year 2021, the elderly population of age over and above 65 years is 740 million which is expected to triple by the year 2050 (WPA, 2019). This increase in the elderly population has raised the overall life expectancy of these people to 73.2 years as of 2021 (Luo et al, 2022). The longer lifetime of the elderly population brings a lot of opportunities not only to the elderly people and families and also to societies. If the elderly people live for a longer time, they may educate the followers (immediate generation people) in terms of business, culture, agriculture, sustainability etc, which leads to education, economy etc for their immediate generation people. However, the extent of these opportunities and contributions highly depends on the health condition of the elderly people. If a person experiences extra life expectancy in his/her life with good health, their ability will be independent of others such as family members, and caretakers to carry out their activities and this may favour their family and community. However, as a result of socio-demographic shifts and the preference for nuclear families, an increasing population of elderly persons lives alone in their homes (Agree, 2018). During this occasion, there may be more chances for accidents such as falls, exposure to heat, fire, and electric shock and this may cause a serious threat to their health (O'Súilleabháin et al, 2019).
Falls are one of the most frequent and cause serious complications among elderly citizens. Falls have a connection with mortality, morbidity and reduced functionality. Elders and caretakers realise that the consequences of falls are indeed dangerous and risky in the long term (WHO, 2008). In general, risk factors for falls can be intrinsic or extrinsic as quoted in Sharif et al (2018). Intrinsic risk factors are characteristic of individuals such as age, prior history of falls, functional impairment, solitary lifestyle, cognitive impairment, and dementia. Exhaustive experimentation has been carried out to address the fall due to intrinsic factors as quoted in Sathyanarayana et al, 2018; Xu et al, 2018; Ansari et al, 2021. Generally, fall occurrences are due to environmental causes such as poor lighting, uneven surfaces, and slippery floors. In specific more falls occurred during the night due to medications, nocturnal disease and poor lighting as reported in Kerzman et al, 2004; Jafarian Amiri et al, 2013; López-Soto et al, 2015; Rose et al, 2020.
Taking the cue from the highlighted issues, an autonomous intelligent fall monitoring system (AIFMS) has been proposed to solve the fall occurrences of the elderly person during nighttime. The system monitors the elder through two retro-reflective stickers pasted on the elders' upper clothing and with simple, low-cost IR cameras installed on the wall of their living environment. The usage of IR cameras, along with reflective tapes provides an advantage and capability of monitoring the elders even with zero luminance. Further, changes in orientation angle and distance between the two reflective sticker points are extracted as features to classify a fall instead of a traditional bounding box or ellipse fitting method. To monitor the fall in the restroom, the timer mechanism is proposed in which the number of frames that the elder accesses the restroom is compared with the frame threshold to report the fall.
The major contribution of the system are
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A new exclusive system - AIFMS has designed for the purpose of fall detection at the night
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The system also has the capability to detect the activities of elderly persons with luminance/ partial luminance and zero luminance (complete dark or night)
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Addresses the welfare of the people with medications/ drugs/ nocturnal diseases
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Low-cost device has been used for the experimentation and implementation
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Provides privacy and security to the subject involved in the experimentation as the DVR – a special device used in the system records only the stickers pasted in the human body rather than the human for storage and other processes.