In this modern and fast-moving world, elderly’s safety and security have become an important issue. According to the World Population Prospects of the United Nations 2015, there is 12.3 per cent population aged 60 and above globally and it is the fastest growing population at a rate of 3.26 per cent per year. In order to reduce the worries about the elderly living alone at home, Elderly Monitoring System is required for continuous monitoring. “Fall†is one of the critical incidents for the elderly living alone as it causes serious injuries. A fall detection system using global system for mobile communication can help to reduce the time of unaware of their next of kin.
In heterogeneous wireless networks, wireless local area network (WLAN) is highly preferred by mobile terminals (MTs) owing to its high transmission bandwidth and low access cost. However, in high-speed environment, handover from a cellular network to a WLAN cell will lead to a high number of handover failures and unnecessary handovers due to the WLAN coverage limitation and will become worse at high speed. A new vertical handover method is proposed to minimize the probability of handover failure and unnecessary handover while maximizing the usage of WLAN in high-speed environment. The simulation results show that the proposed method kept the probability of handover failure and unnecessary handover below 0.5% and 1%, respectively. Compared with previous studies, the proposed method reduced the number of handover failures and unnecessary handovers up to 80.0% and 97.7%, respectively, while the MT is highly mobile. Using the proposed prediction method, the MT can benefit high bandwidth and low network access cost from the WLAN with minimum interruption regardless of speed.