Infant drowning prevention system with wireless accelerometer - Evaluation of optimum floating body shape for home-use

Death due to drowning accounts for approximately 30% of unintentional injury deaths of 1- to 4-year-old children in Japan. Therefore, a drowning prevention system is strongly needed. This paper describes a newly developed system for preventing infant drowning accidents at home. The authors built a prototype system that does the following: measures the wave motion of water in a bathtub using a triaxial accelerometer, detects abnormal wave motion, and produces an audible warning to parents or guardians through radio communication. In this paper, the details of the system and the results of an experiment to collect data for abnormal wave motion detection are shown.