Falls are the leading reason for accidental death among people at age over 65. In order to provide the real-time fall alarm and rescue service for the elderly, especially the one who live alone, in this paper we propose a GPS/GPRS-based remote monitoring terminal for fall detection. It uses sensors which combine three-axis accelerometer and three-axis gyroscope. The terminal is intended to monitor human motions and can recognize events of fall in real time. Falls are recognized using a dedicated algorithm. Once a fall has been detected, the terminal transmits alarm information together with location information to the remote monitoring center through GPRS. In order to avoid false or missed alarms, the terminal also supports manual mode of operation and buttons to send or cancel an alarm. The test results showed that the monitoring terminal can accurately distinguish between normal human activities, condition of fall event and generate alarm when the thresholds of resultant acceleration and resultant angular velocity are, respectively, 5m/s², 25 m/s² and 2 rad/s. The terminal has demonstrated good location accuracy and communication efficiency.