Fraunhofer Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions – AICOS
17.9.2014
Launched by Fraunhofer AICOS in December of 2012 and aiming to investigate in depth all fall related aspects, including activity monitoring and the analysis of the human motion, the Fall Competence Center (FCC) is now online. All the information regarding the FCC, namely its objectives, research areas, developed activities and publications are available at the website http://fcc.fraunhofer.pt.
Above and beyond the general information about de FCC, the website displays important data about the four research areas: Fall Risk Analysis; Age and Illness-related Fall Detection; Assault Detection and Documentation; Physical Activity Monitoring and Falls in Extreme Sports. Each area includes general information as well as specific data concerning the projects and related publications.
All those who are interested in the theme have now the opportunity to follow closely all the developments and improvements that occur within the FCC.
The Fall Competence Center was created to develop research in detecting and preventing human falls and studying the human motion and activities by using wearable inertial sensors. The technological developments achieved are based on smartphones, since these devices are of easy access and continuously used on the daily life. FCC brings together research in several different relevant fields, such as Biomedicine, Biomechanics, Physics, Electronics, Information and Communications Technology, Human-Computer Interaction in order to address and cover all these matters in a resourceful manner.
By improving the knowledge in these areas, the FCC will generate viable solutions for fall detection, fall risk assessment and fall prevention of different fall risk groups. Besides elderly users, who typical are in great risk of falling and suffer from fall-related injuries and their consequences, the FCC is targeting also sportsmen and field officers. The knowledge gathered is being applied to these target groups once, for instance, falls and injuries can occur from the practice of sports, namely extreme sports. Moreover, we aim to increase the security of high risk groups of users as guards, firefighters, security personnel and police officers during their professional activity. Since non-stigmatizing devices are being used, as it is the case of smartphones, the solutions are easily accepted by all these groups. The new solutions have a great potential of being transferred to the industry and contribute to generally improve the quality of life and create value.