A Novel Wearable Origami Device for Head and Cervical Spine Protection in Falls

Abstract

Older adults have a frail bone structure and neurological system, making them more prone to falls than the rest of the population. Falls can lead to head and cervical spine injuries, which are critical since they involve life-threatening surgeries or paralysis. The current solution is to build a wearable protection device to absorb the fall-related forces and prevent head and cervical spine injuries. Nevertheless, current wearable protection systems solely shield the lower-limbs. This work’s main idea is to propose a wearable origami device for head and cervical spine protection in falls. The device is foldable, compact, and lightweight; thus, it can be worn by the subject at any point in time. The device uses a Logistic Regression-based fall detection algorithm coupled with a speech recognition system that detects the fall event and deploys the origami structure to shelter the subject’s head and cervical spine. The free-fall experiments show that the origami’s maximum deformation along the vertical direction is 4cm, the Logistic Regression-based algorithm can detect the fall event with an F1-score of 77.45%, and the speech recognition can distinguish the subject’s shouting with an accuracy of 88.5%. Furthermore, the entire system can deploy in less than 800ms, which is adapted to protect subjects from head and cervical spine injuries.