Dutch firm Wolk is producing a wise wearable airbag designed to be used by the aged or these vulnerable to severe falls. The ‘Wolk’ could be worn discretely beneath the person’s clothes, and is out there in 4 sizes in each a belt and shorts model. If it detects that the wearer is about to fall, the machine will activate to inflate the airbag inside 75 milliseconds, lessening the influence of the autumn on the hip and lowering the severity of hip accidents.
Superior fall detection
“The Wolk makes use of six movement sensors to register each motion as much as 500 occasions per second,” says Filippo van Hellenberg Hubar, CEO at Wolk. “The software program then processes this information, and determines constantly whether or not the person is likely to be falling. When the superior algorithm recognises a fall, the airbag will inflate and defend the hip in opposition to damage.” The proprietary algorithm is supervised utilizing the computational energy of the Nordic Semiconductor nRF9160 SiP, by means of its 64 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 processor with 1 MB Flash and 256 KB RAM.
As soon as the software program has detected a fall and the airbag has inflated, an alarm is triggered, and a notification is distributed to the Cloud utilizing the nRF9160 SiP’s LTE-M/NB-IoT connectivity. From there the notification is forwarded to a nominated member of the family or good friend through the mobile community. From the Cloud-based dashboard, customers can view dwell information from the Wolk, in addition to historic data (akin to earlier fall alarms).
Lengthy battery life
The Wolk can obtain 10-to-20 hours of battery life between prices utilizing a Li-Po battery, relying on the exercise degree of the wearer. The battery lifetime is made attainable partly because of the energy consumption of the nRF9160 SiP, which helps each PSM and eDRX energy saving modes. For each LTE-M and NB-IoT the PSM flooring present is as little as 2.7 µA, and with an eDRX interval of 655 s the typical present is 6 µA for LTE-M and 9 µA for NB-IoT.
“Energy consumption was key to this utility, so the wonderful energy effectivity and energy administration of the Nordic SiP made it the plain selection,” van Hellenberg Hubar says. “We additionally selected the nRF9160 SiP based mostly on its value, measurement, availability, and multimode functionality.
“One other key cause we chosen the nRF9160 SiP was the technical help supplied by Nordic,” continues van Hellenberg Hubar. “For instance, the corporate offered precious help with the {hardware} design overview, as a result of not all {hardware} engineers are modem specialists.”
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