Evaluating the Suitability of a Smart Technology Application for Fall Detection Using a Fuzzy Collaborative Intelligence Approach

Fall detection is a critical task in an aging society. To fulfill this task, smart technology applications have great potential. However, it is not easy to choose a suitable smart technology application for fall detection. To address this issue, a fuzzy collaborative intelligence approach is proposed in this study. In the fuzzy collaborative intelligence approach, alpha-cut operations are applied to derive the fuzzy weights of criteria for each decision maker. Then, fuzzy intersection is applied to aggregate the fuzzy weights derived by all decision makers. Subsequently, the fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution is applied to assess the suitability of a smart technology application for fall detection. The fuzzy collaborative intelligence approach is a posterior-aggregation method that guarantees a consensus exists among decision makers. After applying the fuzzy collaborative intelligence approach to assess the suitabilities of four existing smart technology applications for fall detection, the most and least suitable smart technology applications were smart carpet and smart cane, respectively. In addition, the ranking result using the proposed methodology was somewhat different from those using three existing methods.