Smartphone application for emergency signal detection.
Currently, a number of studies focus on the study and design of new healthcare technologies to improve elderly health and quality of life. Taking advantage of the popularity, portability, and inherent technology of smartphones, we present an emergency application for smartphones, designated as knock-to-panic (KTP). This innovative and novel system enables users to simply hit their devices in order to send an alarm signal to an emergency service. This application is a complete and autonomous emergency system, and can provide an economic, reliable, and unobtrusive method for elderly monitoring or safety protection. Moreover, the simple and fast activation of KTP makes it a viable and potentially superior alternative to traditional ambient assisted living emergency calls. Furthermore, KTP can be further extended to the general population as well and not just be limited for elderly persons. The proposed method is a threshold-based algorithm and is designed to require a low battery power consumption. The evaluation of the performance of the algorithm in collected data indicates that both sensitivity and specificity are above 90%.
CMUC, Department of Mathematics, University of Coimbra, 3001-501 Coimbra, Portugal. Electronic address: isabelf@mat.uc.pt.
Isabel N
IN
Figueiredo
CMUC, Department of Mathematics, University of Coimbra, 3001-501 Coimbra, Portugal. Electronic address: carlosl@mat.uc.pt.
Carlos
C
Leal
CMUC, Department of Mathematics, University of Coimbra, 3001-501 Coimbra, Portugal. Electronic address: luisp@mat.uc.pt.
Luís
L
Pinto
OnCaring, Parque Industrial de Taveiro, Lote 49, 3045-504 Coimbra, Portugal. Electronic address: http://oncaring.com/
Jason
J
Bolito
OnCaring, Parque Industrial de Taveiro, Lote 49, 3045-504 Coimbra, Portugal.
André
A
Lemos
D000465:Algorithms; D004632:Emergency Medical Services; D055595:Mechanical Phenomena; D063731:Mobile Applications; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D000068997:Smartphone
Knock-to-panic; Smartphone; Threshold-based method; Tri-axial accelerometer