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The entry titled "A smarter carpet to catch a senior's fall," and any of the comments about it.
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Home > Plugged In > Archives > 2008 > January > 31 > Entry
A smarter carpet to catch a senior’s fall
My father has suffered a couple of falls — once while backing away from a wasp and a second from his foot being caught in a rut in the lawn. Each time it scared me. But this I didn’t know — that one-third of seniors fall each year and that such falls cause more deaths than any other injury.
An engineering professor at the University of Missouri is working on an invention to alert a caregiver quickly when a fall occurs.
Harry Tyrer has received $200,000 from the Alzheimer’s Association to develop a smart carpet that would electronically monitor a senior’s location and sound an alert in the event of a fall.
Tyrer’s smart carpet project is based a new type of sensor that can be printed on thin, flexible sheets. He’s also developing circuits that will feed the sensor sheet’s signals several times a second to a computer for display and electronic analysis by a caregiver.
It’s a great idea for a problem that most of us don’t think of as a killer.
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