Improvement of Road Surface Discrimination Performance of Movement Support System Using Ultrasonic Sensors
Masahiro Yamamoto, Shota Nakashima, Kazuo Haruyama, Shenglin Mu · 2019
The number of accidents involving elderly individuals has been increasing with the increase of the aging population, and it is a serious problem. Most of the accident are caused by decline in ability of judgment and physical. Therefor, movement supporting tool such as cane for elderly people is used to prevent falls and improve the safety. Individuals moving without the help of a caregiver face a high risk of accidents (such as falls), despite using movement supporting tool. There is a number of studies on support system for elderly people to improve the safety and quality of daily life. They are studies to detect the dangerous road such as a step and obstacle from distance information obtained by an ultrasonic sensor. On the other hand, the actual fall accident has occurred in the road surface, such as grass or gravel not only a step or obstacle. Therefore, there is a need for a system to detect and determine the danger road. We previously showed the effectiveness of the road surface discrimination method using information, the distance to the road surface, the incident angle and the reflection intensity of the ultrasonic sensor. However, it had not been studied the effectiveness of the method at the time of the move. This paper describes the results of the effectiveness of the method at the time of the move.