Fall detection for seniors: why it matters and how it works

Falls are among the most common causes of injury for older people. Often the most dangerous part isn't the fall itself, but lying there for hours with nobody knowing. So the question families are really asking is: how do we find out before the evening, when Mum doesn't pick up the phone?

How wearable fall detectors work

Wearable fall detectors are a category of their own – wristbands and pendants with an accelerometer inside. They recognise a sudden downward movement followed by stillness and conclude from that that someone has fallen. Klidně Doma does not supply such devices; we describe them here because families ask about them more than anything else.

That only works while the senior is actually wearing the device and it is charged. With fall detectors, that is the hard part.

Where wearable detectors fall short

• They have to be worn. A wristband left on the bathroom shelf catches nothing – and the bathroom is where most falls happen.
• They have to be charged. A flat battery looks exactly like a quiet day.
• They trigger falsely. Sitting down hard or dropping the band on a tiled floor can raise an alarm, and after a few false alerts some people take it off for good.
• A slow slide down a wall, or a fall from sitting, often isn't recognised by an accelerometer at all.

What Klidně Doma does instead

Klidně Doma does not detect falls, and we won't pretend otherwise. The home has passive motion sensors – they record nothing, and the senior neither wears nor charges them. They watch a single thing: whether anything is moving in a room. That turns out to say a surprising amount.

• Presence in the bathroom, but no movement for twenty minutes – the family gets a message.
• Nothing has moved anywhere in the flat by the agreed morning hour, when Mum is usually in the kitchen by seven.
• A night trip to the toilet with no return to the bedroom.
• The front door left open.
• The home unit stops reporting in – the family finds that out straight away, not after a week of silence.

The message goes to the family – the people you nominate – typically within five minutes of a rule being met. Klidně Doma is not an emergency line: we don't call an ambulance and we have no dispatch desk that sends anyone to your relative. Whether to phone the neighbour, get in the car or dial the emergency number is your decision.

Why speed matters

• The sooner the family knows, the sooner someone can get there.
• The senior may not be able to call or reach a phone.
• Without an alert, the problem often surfaces only hours later, at the next visit or phone call.

A tool, not a miracle

It's fair to say that no technology can prevent every fall or replace human care. What technology can do is shorten the time nobody knows about the problem. That is the whole of its value – and it isn't small.

Choosing the right solution

The right setup depends on the senior's mobility, the layout of the home and whether they're willing to wear anything at all. For some people a help button makes sense, for others passive sensors in the rooms, sometimes both. That's why we set the rules and the sensor placement after a consultation – not from a one-size-fits-all template.