5. Smart Technologies for Fall Detection and Prevention

Fall detection and prevention is a critical task in smart homes and smart cities. To fulfill this task, smart technology applications have great potential. This chapter begins by highlighting the consequences of falls, particularly in older adults, thus emphasizing the importance of fall detection and prevention. Subsequently, existing smart technology applications for fall detection and prevention are reviewed. Judging from the review results, existing smart technology applications can be divided into two major categories: smart wearable technology applications and cloud and edge computing applications. However, it is not easy to choose a suitable smart technology application for fall detection. To address this issue, a fuzzy multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach is introduced. In the fuzzy MCDM approach, alpha-cut operations are applied to derive the fuzzy weights of criteria for each decision maker. Then, fuzzy intersection is applied to aggregate the fuzzy weights derived by all decision makers. Subsequently, the fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) is applied to assess the suitability of a smart technology application for fall detection. The fuzzy MCDM approach is a posterior-aggregation method that guarantees a consensus exists among decision makers.