Abstract
The social activities of the elderly have been increasing as our society progresses toward an aging society. As their activities are increased, the occurrence of falls that could lead to fractures are increased. Falls are serious health hazards to the elderly and we need more thorough understanding of falls including the progress of falls and the impact area in various fall directions. Many of the traditional methods of falls research dealt with voluntary falls by younger subject since older subject can easily get fracture from voluntary falls. So, it has been difficult to get exact data about falls of the elderly. Here, we tried to capture the characteristics of the movements of major joints using three dimensional motion capture system during falls experiments using a moving mattress that can safely induce unexpected falls. Healthy younger subjects participated in the actual falls experiment and the moving mattress was actuated by a pneumatic system. The kinematic parameters such as velocities and accelerations of major segments were imported to a computer simulation environment and falls to hard surfaces were simulated in a computational environment using a realistic human model of aged persons. The simulation was able to give approximations to contact forces which can occur during actual falls.
