What happens if a senior citizen falls on their head and is knocked unconscious? How will they call for help? An emergency device therefore needs to automatically detect the falls of seniors.
Fall detection in Ruxum is running all the time. Using an AI-trained algorithm, Ruxum looks for real-life falls, which are a combination of hard and soft falls. Hard falls usually occur when a person slips and falls from a height greater than 5 feet and has a hard impact. A soft fall is typically a fall from a short height greater than 3 feet or in a small area while trying to hold on to anything, still with a noticeable impact. Most falls are detectable, but some movements are not classified as falls especially if there is no difference between the “fall” and the person sitting down on a chair or lying down on a bed.
When a fall is detected, Ruxum buzzes for 20 seconds. In this period, if the user feels they are OK, they can cancel the panic alert by pressing the button once. This helps prevent false alarms. If a user does nothing, Ruxum assumes that the senior citizen has truly fallen and sends out the panic alert.
Generally, when the device misses detecting a “fall”, it is because the movement was slow or the user ended up on a soft surface such as a sofa cushion. Based on our experience with 1000s of falls, we conclude that the movement itself is not sufficient to injure the user. So, in that case, we expect the user to be able to press the panic button and raise an alarm if really required.
Ruxum’s fall detection algorithm was tested thoroughly using human test subjects of various sizes simulating falls, plunges, nosedives, slips, tumbles, breakdowns, all in the safety of a karate dojo.