JP2008242704A - Safety confirmation system using tilt switch - Google Patents

Abstract

<P>PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a system for detecting the fall, rise from a bed, and indoor location of a solitary old person or the like, the fall and indoor or outdoor location of a construction worker who works alone, consolidating the above information, and confirming and reporting their safety. <P>SOLUTION: The safety confirmation system is provided with: a tilt sensor for detecting the fall, rise from the bed, and indoor location of a solitary old person or the like by means of a tilt switch; a safety information transmission device connected to a detection system by way of power line communication (PLC) or specified low power radio or the like to distribute detected information to a wide area network; and a safety information management device for consolidating and analyzing the information and confirming and reporting the safety of the person. <P>COPYRIGHT: (C)2009,JPO&INPIT

Description

  The present invention detects the fall of a single person living alone, getting out of bed or indoor location, detecting the fall of a single construction worker, or the location of an indoor or outdoor location, centrally managing this information, and confirming its safety -It is related to the notification system.

  Nearly 18% of the elderly in Japan are in need of care, but others are self-reliant and are still energetic. However, as you get older, muscle weakness and loss of balance are unavoidable, and you inevitably get injured. If an unforeseen accident occurs, it may be possible that the elderly are living alone away from their children, so the discovery is delayed and not helpful. Among such “unexpected accidents of the elderly” is “falling, falling”. About one out of every two elderly people have a broken bone. There are many examples of falling asleep and inconvenient limbs with a single fall.

  In the present age when the population is aging, the cohabitation rate of elderly people and their families is also decreasing. Along with the increase in the number of elderly people living alone, there is a need to develop a safety confirmation system that reduces concerns for family members who live far away, visits by caregivers, etc., and reduces discomfort without requiring special operations for the elderly. .

  Conventionally, Patent Document 1 discloses a human sensor (pyroelectric sensor) that is attached to each room of a house to detect a resident's movement, a device sensor attached to each facility of the house, and outputs of the human sensor and the device sensor. A resident having a control device that takes in the data, estimates the health status of the resident from the data, and creates a report to the remote caregiver, and a modem that outputs the report created by the control device to a telephone line An elderly safety confirmation system has been disclosed that can estimate health conditions from living conditions and automatically notify nurses without violating the privacy of the elderly.

  Further, in Patent Document 2, human sensors are arranged in each room of a single person's house, and the stay time in each room of the single person is detected in real time using the human sensor and recorded in the storage unit. In a system for searching data stored in the storage unit from a remote terminal, the human sensor continues to detect for a predetermined time for each room or in a time zone in which a human should not be detected A single-person safety confirmation system for notifying an alarm to a remote terminal when a human sensor detects is disclosed.

However, both systems require modification of existing facilities and equipment, and it is necessary to consider the problem of the power supply of each device.
JP 2007-18525 A JP 2005-258935 A

  The purpose of the present invention is to solve the power supply problems of each device by using a tilt switch for the sensor and using power line carrier communication (PLC) or specific low power radio for the indoor network, and remodeling existing facilities and equipment. It is to provide a safety confirmation system that can be used without any adjustment, is easy to handle, and requires little adjustment.

In order to achieve these objects, the present invention is configured as follows.
The invention according to claim 1 is provided between a tilt sensor having at least one tilt switch, a safety information transmission device that accumulates information detected by the tilt sensor, and between the tilt sensor and the safety information transmission device. A first information transmission means; a safety information management apparatus that unifies information accumulated in the safety information transmission apparatus; and a second information transmission means provided between the safety information transmission apparatus and the safety information management apparatus. It is a safety confirmation system provided.
The invention according to claim 2 is the safety confirmation system according to claim 1, wherein the tilt sensor is provided on a movable object.
The invention according to claim 3 is the safety confirmation system according to claim 1 or 2, wherein the first information transmission means is power line carrier communication (PLC).
The invention according to claim 4 is the safety confirmation system according to claim 1 or 2, wherein the first information transmission means is a specific low power radio.
The invention according to claim 5 is the safety confirmation system according to any one of claims 1 to 4, wherein the second information transmission means is the Internet.
The invention according to claim 6 is the safety confirmation system according to any one of claims 1 to 4, wherein the second information transmission means is wireless packet communication.

  In the present invention, a tilt switch is used to connect a tilting sensor that detects the falling or leaving of an elderly person living alone, an indoor location, and a detection system using a power line carrier communication (PLC), a specific low power radio, or the like. Establishing a safety confirmation system by providing a safety information transmission device that sends detected information to a wide area network and a safety information management device that centrally manages and analyzes this information to confirm and notify the safety of the target person can do. Existing facilities and equipment can be used without modification, and are easy to handle and require little adjustment. Furthermore, the power supply problem of each apparatus can be solved by using power line carrier communication (PLC), specific low power radio, etc. for an indoor network.

  In addition, the present invention can be applied to a safety information management system that detects the fall of a construction worker alone or the indoor / outdoor location.

  The organization chart of the entire safety confirmation system of the present invention is shown in FIG. The tilt sensor detects a fall or door opening / closing. A tilt switch is used to detect the tilt, and the detected information is collected in a safety information transmitter using power line communication (PLC) or specific low-power radio. The collected information is centrally managed by the safety information management device via the Internet, wireless packets, etc., and the safety is confirmed, and the safety information is notified to a distant family or caregiver.

  YAG 1B-R / A manufactured by Sagami Electronics, which is a tilt switch that reacts only in one direction, was used for the tilt sensor used in the safety confirmation system circuit. The tilt sensor detects the tilt of the device and sends information to power line communication (PLC) at regular intervals. This tilt sensor is easier to handle and less expensive than an acceleration sensor, a gyro sensor, or the like.

  FIG. 2 shows an operation circuit diagram of the tilt sensor of the apparatus used for the operation experiment.

  In addition, power line communication (PLC) is a technology that superimposes a signal on an AC 100V or 200V power line existing in a household and uses it as a communication line. Install an adapter for communication in an electrical outlet existing in the home and connect it to the safety information transmitter.

  Since most buildings have electrical wiring, you can easily build a structural communication network without laying new cables. This has the advantage that the power company's distribution network can be used as it is as a communication infrastructure.

  In the experiment, the inclination sensors of the safety confirmation system that was created were installed at the above four locations on the entrance door, toilet door, toilet sink knob, and personal computer.

  The inclination sensor is connected to the power line communication device, and the on / off of the switch is transmitted to the safety information transmitting device through the power line at regular intervals. The received signal is automatically written to the safety information management device as 1 when it is on and 0 when it is off. This is displayed in a graph.

  First, as an action verification experiment, we recorded behaviors from the entrance to the toilet, opening the computer, opening the computer, closing the computer, exiting the entrance, and returning. The result of the experiment is shown in FIG. From the graph, on and off of the switch according to the behavior pattern are displayed as 0 and 1. As a result, it was confirmed that the tilt sensor was operating normally.

  In addition, as an outing detection verification experiment, an experiment was conducted to confirm whether elderly people were at home or absent. In this experiment, the behavior pattern of going out from home and going home was verified. The result of the experiment is shown in FIG. From the graph, you can see that when you were at home, you went to the toilet, then opened and closed the entrance door, and after a certain period of time, the entrance door opened and closed again and started up the computer. It can be seen that there was no absence during this period since the front door opened and closed and no tilt sensor installed indoors reacted during a certain period of time.

  In addition, as an experiment for verifying rising detection, an experiment was performed in which an inclination sensor was attached to the chest part of the body, which is the upper body of a person, to detect whether an elderly person is awake or sleeping. In this experiment, the inclination sensor that had been attached to the door part of the entrance was attached to the chest part. The result of the experiment is shown in FIG. You can see that the first half is getting up and going to the bathroom. You can see that the latter half is in a sleeping position. When I slept, I tried to roll over, but the tilt sensor did not respond. From this result, it was confirmed that it can be applied to rising detection.

  Furthermore, as a fall detection verification experiment, an experiment was performed assuming that an elderly person falls and cannot move due to a tilt sensor attached to the chest. The results of the experiment are shown in FIG. After waking up and opening and closing the toilet door, the tilt sensor attached to the chest shows an off response. This shows the state where the body is sleeping. At the same time, the tilt sensor attached to the sink sink knob does not respond. From the above results, it can be confirmed that an elderly person who went to the toilet falls in the toilet and cannot move.

  From the above experiment, it was possible to collect data on the safety information management device via the power line communication on and off of the tilt switch. When the system was installed and the daily behavior pattern was taken, there was no resistance or discomfort, and it was confirmed that the use of power line communication could prevent the elderly from falling alone without extra wiring.

  In this embodiment, four switches are used, but the number of switches may be increased. In this case, in order to reduce the amount of data to be transferred, there is a method in which communication is performed only when the switch state changes.

  As shown in FIG. 7, the fall detection notification system includes a tilt switch, a wireless device (transmitter, receiver), and a safety information management device.

  The experiment was a contactless switch using light as a tilt switch, and DS-BA1H (Nihon Switch Co., Ltd.) that supports 360 ° in all directions was used.

In addition, WCU-241 and WCU-242 of K2 Electronics Co., Ltd. were used as wireless devices. The reason for choosing WCU-242 is that it uses 2.4GHz. Wireless communication using the 2.4 GHz band is called a specific low-power radio and does not require qualification for its use, so anyone can use it.
This time, WCU-242 was used as a transmitter and the company's WCU-241 motherboard and WCU-241 were used as receivers.

  The fall detection device includes a tilt switch, WCU-242, and a button battery 3V as a power source. As an attachment method, it was manufactured by attaching to a belt. The communication speed was set to 1Mbps.

  A change in the output of the tilt switch attached to this device is received by the microcomputer of the wireless device, and a fall is determined. It continues to send 1-byte information every 10 ms, and as shown in Fig. 8, within the 1-byte, the fall judgment results 1 (normal) and 0 (fall), the tilt switch output 1 (ON) and 0 ( OFF), 3 kinds of information of number for confirming data loss are placed.

  In order to verify the fall judgment, we conducted a second experiment of walking for 10 seconds and falling forward. Each experiment was measured 10 times to examine the output of the transmitter tilt switch.

In the walking experiment, we walked on a flat road for 10 seconds, and in the upright forward falling experiment, we fell from an upright position to a sofa with a height of 0.3 m, and after falling down, we maintained the posture of falling down for 5 seconds.
According to the results of the walking experiment, the output did not change for 8 times out of 10 measurements. However, in the remaining two times, there was a case where the output of the tilt switch was switched many times, but the time during which the output of the tilt switch was kept OFF was 490 ms at the maximum.

  Next, according to the result of the fall experiment, in the fall experiment, in 9 out of 10 experiments, the switch remained switched off after switching. However, there was a moment when the switch was switched many times after the fall for the remaining one. This is a chattering phenomenon and caused chattering for 210 ms. However, when the chattering was over, the output of the tilt switch remained OFF.

  If a human actually falls, it is difficult to get up so easily, and even if it is mild, if it takes time to recover from the fall state, the chattering time at the time of fall is 210 ms and OFF when walking It is thought that it is sufficient to judge a fall with a longer cycle than the state of 490 ms. That is, it is considered that the fall can be sufficiently detected if it is judged that the tilt switch has been turned off if the OFF state continues for 1000 ms after the tilt switch is turned off.

It is an organization chart of the whole safety confirmation system of the present invention. It is an operation circuit diagram of a tilt sensor. It is a figure which shows an operation verification experiment result. It is a figure which shows an outing detection verification experiment result. It is a figure which shows a rising detection verification experiment result. It is a figure which shows a fall detection verification experiment result. It is a figure which shows the fall detection notification system of this invention. It is a figure which shows the content of the information transmitted.

Claims (6)

  A tilt sensor provided with at least one tilt switch, a safety information transmitting device for accumulating information detected by the tilt sensor, a first information transmitting means provided between the tilt sensor and the safety information transmitting device, A safety confirmation system comprising: a safety information management device that unifies information accumulated in a safety information transmission device; and second information transmission means provided between the safety information transmission device and the safety information management device.   The safety confirmation system according to claim 1, wherein the tilt sensor is provided on a movable object.   The safety confirmation system according to claim 1 or 2, wherein the first information transmission means is power line carrier communication (PLC).   The safety confirmation system according to claim 1 or 2, wherein the first information transmission means is a specific low power radio.   The safety confirmation system according to any one of claims 1 to 4, wherein the second information transmission means is the Internet.   The safety confirmation system according to any one of claims 1 to 4, wherein the second information transmission means is wireless packet communication.

Images