Inspiration

Every one of us has a grandparent who fell at home and ended up in the hospital. About 1 in 4 adults over 65 falls each year, and in Canada falls sent over 78,000 older adults to the hospital in 2022. We thought it'd be too clunky to build a mechanism to soften the fall entirely so we compromised: if can't always stop the fall, how can we make the minutes after it count?

What it does

SoftWear is a smart jacket and room camera that detects a fall, lights up the injured body parts, and shows paramedics where the body hit

Detects a fall using an IMU in the jacket and a camera in the room
Shows responders a dashboard with a body map of likely contact points, an impact severity level, and a graph of the fall

How we built it

An IMU in the jacket records the fall, and a room camera confirms it and tracks posture afterward. We use the fall direction and final position to work out which part of the body likely hit the floor. Uses an ESP32 as the microcontroller.

Challenges we ran into

Many first design iterations of physical catching that did not work due to complications
Our sensors can't measure force extremely accurately, or see the head, so we show "likely contact" and "not measured" instead of claiming real injuries
Difficulties with integrating both IMU and camera into an interface
Wiring LEDs

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A complete system from sensor to responder, not just a fall detector or camera with a speaker.
A dashboard a paramedic can read in seconds with real life application
A design based on real research on where older adults land and get hurt