Hippy project

The Hippy project is a collaborative project which is part of a CIFRE thesis aimed at adding more advanced methods of data analysis and artificial intelligence to improve the performance of a belt designed to detect falls in advance and trigger an airbag to prevent femoral neck fractures.

The key scientific challenges include the transfer of knowledge between different population groups with the aim of optimising the performance of a learning algorithm which would work with elderly individuals after learning from young and healthy people (falls are rarely measured among the elderly and, fortunately, few examples make it possible to adjust the algorithms appropriately to obtain optimal performance with high sensitivity and specificity).

After submissions to two committees for the protection of individuals (CPPs, the French equivalent of research ethics committee) and experiments conducted in French nursing homes, the initial results are encouraging with sensitivity levels above 95% for the majority of cases measured on certain algorithms. These results have yet to be confirmed.