Fall alarm

With aging, people can become frail. A common problem is falling and not being able to get up. Nowadays many elderly use a neckless with a button, which can be pressed to get into contact with an Alarm Centre. They try to talk to the user and send help when needed. For this project we wanted to make this system more efficient and pleasurable. Elderly mentioned that they didn’t want to put too much pressure on loved ones but also didn’t want to be helped by strangers.

We designed a fall-alarm app that was inspired by the Reanimate Alarm app, an app from the Dutch Heart Association. This app send an alarm to people who have the app, based on their current location. Nowadays the standard contact list of alarm centers consist of 3 people, the one on top of the list will be called first, if that person cannot be reached the second person will be called, and so on. With the new app the contact list can be broadened to as many persons as are willing to help. These people download the app, in which they can provide their status of availability. In case of a fall, the alarm center can use the app to automatically send a message to the closest available person to the elderly. By not using absolute distance but by using different ranges it can be made sure that not always the same person will be contacted due to small difference in distance to the elderly between people. And by using different levels of helpers, priority can be set over which people to contact first. By doing this, more people might be willing to be set as helper, knowing they only will be contacted if, for example the family, is not able to help.

With this system the reaction time can be reduced, making sure the elderly get the help they need as quick as possible. Also the pressure for the caregivers can be reduces, they won’t get called when not available and multiple caregivers can be set to the first level helpers, so that the pressure is distributed.