Abstract
Shriners Hospitals for Children, Northern California wants to study the effect of Botox medicine on children with cerebral palsy in reducing the number of falls. The hardware for a home fall monitor was built. The home fall monitor consists of a microcontroller and accelerometers. Software for the microcontroller needs to be developed to process the accelerometer signals in order to compute the child’s activity level, detect fall events, and store the activity values and fall events in the nonvolatile flash memory of the microcontroller for a two-week period. For this project, code was written to sample the accelerometer signals, calculate activity level, and detect falls based on a given algorithm. The device records the activity level of a person for a two-week period. When a fall event occurs, the elapsed time and the fall information are stored in the flash memory of the microcontroller. The device also stores the starting time and date of a session, patient information, and calibration values in the flash memory. The code also provides a way to transfer the information stored in the flash memory to a personal computer for data analysis. Testing in the laboratory confirmed that the activity and fall data were calculated and stored properly. Patient information sent from the personal computer was written to the flash memory, and the stored activity and fall data were successfully uploaded to the personal computer for analysis. The device is now ready for testing on human subjects.