An Advanced First Aid System Based on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and a Wireless Body Area Sensor Network for Elderly Persons in Outdoor Environments

Abstract

For elderly persons, a fall can cause serious injuries such as a hip fracture or head injury. Here, an advanced first aid system is proposed for monitoring elderly patients with heart conditions that puts them at risk of falling and for providing first aid supplies using an unmanned aerial vehicle. A hybridized fall detection algorithm (FDB-HRT) is proposed based on a combination of acceleration and a heart rate threshold. Five volunteers were invited to evaluate the performance of the heartbeat sensor relative to a benchmark device, and the extracted data was validated using statistical analysis. In addition, the accuracy of fall detections and the recorded locations of fall incidents were validated. The proposed FDB-HRT algorithm was 99.16% and 99.2% accurate with regard to heart rate measurement and fall detection, respectively. In addition, the geolocation error of patient fall incidents based on a GPS module was evaluated by mean absolute error analysis for 17 different locations in three cities in Iraq. Mean absolute error was 1.08 × 10−5° and 2.01 × 10−5° for latitude and longitude data relative to data from the GPS Benchmark system. In addition, the results revealed that in urban areas, the UAV succeeded in all missions and arrived at the patient’s locations before the ambulance, with an average time savings of 105 s. Moreover, a time saving of 31.81% was achieved when using the UAV to transport a first aid kit to the patient compared to an ambulance. As a result, we can conclude that when compared to delivering first aid via ambulance, our design greatly reduces delivery time. The proposed advanced first aid system outperformed previous systems presented in the literature in terms of accuracy of heart rate measurement, fall detection, and information messages and UAV arrival time.