Development of a Human Airbag System for Fall Protection Using MEMS Motion Sensing Technology

This paper describes the development of a human airbag system which is designed to reduce the impact force from falls. A micro inertial measurement unit (muIMU), based on MEMS accelerometers and gyro sensors is developed as the motion sensing part of the system. A recognition algorithm is used for real-time fall determination. With the algorithm, a microcontroller integrated with the muIMU can discriminate falling-down motion from normal human motions and trigger an airbag system when a fall occurs. Our airbag system is designed to have fast response with moderate input pressure, i.e., the experimental response time is less than 0.3 second under 0.4 MPa. In addition, we present our progress on using support vector machine (SVM) training together with the muIMU to better distinguish falling and normal motions. Experimental results show that selected eigenvector sets generated from 200 experimental data sets can be accurately separated into falling and other motions