Z. Rahemtulla, A. Turner, R. Wickenden, K. Marasinghe, C. Oliveira, T. Dias, T. Hughes-Riley.

A sock capable of detecting falls and near-fall has been developed. This innovation can be used to help older adults by providing an accurate assessment of how many near-falls they are experiencing, as this can indicate if they are at an increased risk of falling. The over-sock was created by incorporating an electronic yarn with an embedded inertial measurement unit (IMU), which measures angular velocity and acceleration in three dimensions. Data was collected and used to train and test a bi-directional long-term short-term memory (BiLSTM) network. Currently, this innovation can identify between activities of daily living, falls, and near falls with an accuracy of 94.2 %.

The ATRG have previously published on the development of fall and near-fall detecting over-socks. Details on the article can be found below:

Rahemtulla, Z., Turner, A., Oliveira, C., Kaner, J., Dias, T., Hughes-Riley, T. 2023. The design and engineering of a fall and near-fall detection electronic textile. Materials, 16(5), 1920.