For week 10 of our project, we focused on compiling the lab report as requested by our advisor. At our weekly group meeting, we created a Google drive file so that all group members could edit the report simultaneously. We began by first identifying the background of our project. In brief, our project is structured around the fact that as people grow older, their stability decreases and their risk of falling increases. Between 20 and 30 percent of falls among the elderly may result in injury, hip fracture, or even death, according to the CDC. As such, our project focuses on this issue, and trying to find a way to quantify a person’s stability in order to increase life expectancy and improve the person’s overall quality of life.
We then moved on to defining our project goals. Essentially, the goal is to develop a wearable device that creates a disturbance, which will disrupt the patient’s stability. Through sensors and data acquisition equipment, we will be able to quantify the person’s balance and stability.
For specific objectives, we wrote that the device will perturb the person at random intervals throughout the day, and record the acceleration of the user. From our data analysis we will able to quantify the person’s stability.
Our bigger picture is to improve the quality of life for aging people. Next quarter, we plan to decide on a design to prototype and begin the prototyping process.
In addition to compiling our final report, we also presented our group poster at the Fall poster review. We received some helpful feedback regarding our specifications, as well as our approach to taking data samples.