Undergraduate Projects

Falls are more likely to occur in an aging population and can result in fractures or fatal incidents . According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2021), there were roughly 1,122 individuals aged 65-69 per 100,000 who were hospitalised from falling.
Although research on fall prevention and detection has been undertaken, much of it has focused on identifying falls after they’ve occurred (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2021).

SwayCARE was developed for Android devices to address fall prevention and detection. SwayCARE uses the gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer mobile sensors to conduct postural sway tests. A user conducts a 10-second test in SwayCARE that requires them to remain as steady as they can, with their phone in their pocket. Once the test has been completed, the results are saved to the system automatically if a user is signed in. If users are not signed in, tests will not save unless they sign up or log in to the SwayCARE community.

SwayCARE has different logged-in user roles which are: patients, nurses, clinicians, and administrators. All users are able to perform sway tests, manage their profiles and, with the exception of nurses, view the results of sway tests. Patients receive a summarised result page while clinicians and administrators are provided with a robust graphical representation of the results. Clinicians and administrators are able to export these visualised results in Portable Document Format (PDF) for trend evaluation. Administrators are able to export raw sensor test data, delete tests, as well as manage user details, roles, and the patients’ nurses and clinicians manage.

SwayCARE has been designed under the mantra of security and usability. An email verification system during sign-up and password resets, HTTPS connectivity and password hashing was done to protect the personal information of SwayCARE users. SwayCARE also has been designed for elderly users in mind, with the screens being easy to read with large text and with soothing colours of green.

The project was developed in the Java programming language for the Android application and Spring Boot server, Nginx for a reverse proxy and a MySQL database (non-encrypted) for data storage.

The team hopes that the SwayCARE proof of concept could potentially lead to further development to establish a tool to identify patients who are at higher risk of falls, so that preventative actions can be taken prior to a life-changing fall.