The Invisible Crisis Facing Our Seniors & Veterans

We didn’t just set out to build a piece of assistive technology; we engineered a definitive response to a catastrophic public health epidemic. Falls are not random, isolated incidents; they are ordinary moments that turn fatal in milliseconds.

• The Leading Killer: For Americans aged 65 and older, falls are the number one cause of injury-related death—outranking motor vehicle accidents and firearms combined. Every year, over 43,000 older Americans lose their lives to a fall. With over 61 million Americans age 65 or older, the danger is only growing. Especially considering this is the fastest growing demographic in America.
• The Financial Bleed: Non-fatal falls drive over 3 million emergency room visits and over 1 million hospital admissions annually, inflicting an astronomical $80 billion annual drain on the U.S. healthcare system. Much of this burden ($53.3 billion) is borne directly by taxpayers through public programs, with the remaining balance spread across Medicare and other institutions.
• The Post-Admission Clock: A single serious fall can trigger an acute hospital stay averaging 5.5 to 7.3 days, ballooning to nearly 10 days for hip fractures. If a patient experiences institutional delays waiting for an open bed at a skilled nursing facility, that stay skyrockets to an average of 26.3 days, costing upwards of $70,000 per event.

The Post-Fall Trap

Existing market solutions are entirely reactive. Post-fall pendants and wall-mounted buttons do absolutely nothing to prevent the potential initial physical trauma—they simply alert emergency services after the damage is done.

When a hip fracture occurs, a person’s life trajectory changes permanently:

• The 1-Year Mortality Window: A hip fracture is a massive, systemic trauma. The one-year mortality rate sits between 15% and 30%.
• Loss of Autonomy: Fewer than half of all hip fracture survivors ever regain their pre-fall functional independence. Over 50% plunge into permanent dependence on caregivers, and the odds of requiring long-term nursing home placement surge 3.8 to 4.5-fold.
• The Fear-of-Falling Cycle: Even a non-injurious fall triggers a psychological trauma loop. The resulting fear causes elders to naturally restrict their mobility, accelerating muscle wasting (sarcopenia), worsening their balance, and ironically doubling the probability of a subsequent fall.

Our Approach: Pre-Impact Defiance

BOUNCE™ is built around a disruptive paradigm: Protection must adapt to people—not the other way around. In a real-world fall, ground impact occurs in a brutal 1/3 to 1/2 of a second (300 to 500 milliseconds). To potentially greatly reduce injuries risk and possibly save a life, protection must fully deploy in under 330 milliseconds. BOUNCE™ shatters this limitation and fully deploys under 150 milliseconds.

Operating at an ultra-high-speed telemetry rate of 1,600 Hz, our advanced hardware utilizes a Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) sensor architecture. Three independent Inertial Measurements Units (IMU's) continuously stream 6-axis (x3=18-axis)kinematic data to a high-performance STM32 microcontroller via high-speed data lines. It’s designed and in prototyping now. The firmware implements a strict 2-of-3 voting system for extreme reliability:

With a total system deployment response time clocking in under 150 milliseconds, the system commands a high-reliability firing circuit to execute a phased, multi-stage deployment sequence well before ground impact:

• Stage 1 (Vertical Stabilization): The system instantly deploys a lower "skirt" airbag to cushion the hips and pelvis to down below the knees.
• Stage 2 (Horizontal Containment): Milliseconds later, the upper airbag fires horizontally roughly 6 inches from the body before expanding upward. This horizontal deployment path safely captures and shields the upper torso, head, and arms, regardless of their position during the fall.