Fall detection--principles and methods.

Fall detection of the elderly is a major public health problem. Thus it has generated a wide range of applied research and prompted the development of telemonitoring systems to enable the early diagnosis of fall conditions. This article is a survey of systems, algorithms and sensors, for the automatic early detection of the fall of elderly persons. It points out the difficulty to compare the performances of the different systems due to the lack of a common framework. It then proposes a procedure for this evaluation.