Non-profit disabled help; fall detection

I volunteer for a non-profit that helps keep disabled adults independent in their own homes. We are just wading into the IoT waters, however at my regular day job I’m a cloud engineer so I’m not an IT/technology novice. Has anyone seen or have experience with a fall detection device that can integrate with Home Assistant? Many of our clients have physical impediments that increase their fall risk so our first issue to tackle is this one. If there’s one that is open-source and can be created/configured without a huge time investment that would be fine. The reason for the time constraint is all of us technology people are all volunteers and we have over 130 clients in their own homes so if it took someone 20 hours to make a device, we could never roll it out to everyone that could use one.

Thanks!

Do you have example of something that you have used or would use that works well?

With that information it would be easier for some of us who have no idea of requirement to create device or recommend device that fits this task.

Strangly enough. Searching “Open Source Fall Detection” brings up interesting items.
Anything arduino can use MQTT to communicate with HA reliably
I think idea below with battery and MQTT(instead of sms) may work
not sure how hard it would be to place accelerometer and battery to ESP8266

I also saw some camera based AI applications.

Are there some budget constraint? I expect $5000US to be too much but $300US OK?
Would mulitple sensor be OK? (body motion sensor detect fall, several sonic sensor pointing horizontal detect sudden object vertical drop)

I did check the information genie (Google) and found some fall detectors. Our budget isn’t concrete yet because we’re waiting on some grants to come through, though if we get the ones we think we’ll get along with matching donations from corporate donors we’re looking at a budget of ~$3,000 per site. That would have to cover the other facets we wish to automate such as lights, door entry, etc. The main concern is time. I work a full-time job, I’m getting my graduate IT degree, and have kids so I simply don’t have the time to make ~130 of these things if they are going to take me more than five hours. Now if the first one takes me that long, but I can automate or streamline the process for subsequent ones, that could work out.

There are services to automate device build.
Or hired labor but yes… completely understand. Just wanting to know requirements no as not to recommend complete non starter items.

No worries!

So the device would hopefully be able to detect if the person has fallen, and if so, send a notification to their aid. It would be cool if it could also function as a pedometer too, but that would be a nice to have.

Maybe you could make 1 setup and then just make an copy of that SD card to the other units?

That’s kinda what I was thinking I could do, I’m more concerned about the physical build time though if we were to DIY instead of going with a COTS solution.

This is fall detector using mqtt+gyroscope/acelorometer

Depth sensitive cameras? Seeing quite a few ads for these in my day job for industrial applications including as an optical CMM

http://witrack.csail.mit.edu/
maybe reach out to MIT.

EDIT
looks like they are looking at product launch
http://www.emeraldforhome.com/#about

possibly related product
http://xandem.com/

This camera has some amazing AI that may be able to do what you need

https://www.light.house/

A very special topic and I have discovered this website only today 22/6/18. ON behalf of a department of the UK government I am researching how technology can assist the elderly and disabled. We have a conference on the subject set for 17th of July next in Shrewsbury, England. My current technical solution is to provide a replaceable wrist watch which is also a heart monitor and a MIMIC unit in each room. The MIMIC unit would detect movement and or lack of movement and talk to and listen to the occupant and read the heart monitor. However, in the past few days I have discovered a system invented at MIT by Professor Dina Katabi, that claims to be able to monitor every aspect of a person without the person having to wear anything, and it works through walls etc. I am trying to get critical detail and where the system is commercially. It appears that a company called EMERALDFORHOME is involved but so far they are not active in responding to me. When I discover more I will feed the info into the debate. Any comments and or advice or interest of any kind is welcome. You can contact me via [email protected].

Where is it that you work? I work for a man with SMA and have heavily involved myself in these waters, all alone. I want to join up with some people.