Abstract
This article reviews the use of wearable sensors for the monitoring of physical activity (PA) for different purposes, including assessment of gait and balance, prevention and/or detection of falls, recognition of various PAs, conduction and assessment of rehabilitation exercises and monitoring of neurological disease progression. The article provides in-depth information on the retrieved articles and discusses study shortcomings related to demographic factors, i.e., age, gender, healthy participants vs patients, and study conditions. It is well known that motion patterns change with age and the onset of illnesses, and that the risk of falling increases with age. Yet, studies including older persons are rare. Gender distribution was not even provided in several studies, and others included only, or a majority of, men. Another shortcoming is that none of the studies were conducted in real-life conditions. Hence, there is still important work to be done in order to increase the usefulness of wearable sensors in these areas. The article highlights flaws in how studies based on previously collected datasets report on study samples and the data collected, which makes the validity and generalizability of those studies low. Exceptions exist, such as the promising recently reported open dataset FallAllD, wherein a longitudinal study with older adults is ongoing.
Highlights
To study the impact of the taskoriented arm training regime (T-TOAT), three tests were performed at baseline, after 4 and 8 weeks and AT 6 months post training: (1) FuglMeyer Motor Assessment (FMA) to assess arm-hand function/activity, (2) the Action
Starting with the works focused at Parkinson’s disease (PD) [87,88,89,90], Baraka et al (2019) [87] proposed the use of an accelerometer and forearm surface EMG (sEMG) for monitoring human locomotion and study the feasibility of using such sensors for discriminating between healthy people and those with tremors
The results showed that the system is sensitive to motor changes for tests 1 and 2, but no results were provided for tests 3 and 4 due to only a few patients with MS (PwMS) performing the tests for clinical pertinence
Summary
Kristoffersson and Lindén (2020a) [2] performed and published a systematic review on the use of wearable body sensors for health monitoring. The original article, which covered a large field of health monitoring, provided a qualitative synthesis of sociodemographic and research-methodological aspects of 73 articles. These articles were retrieved during a literature search conducted in April 2019. Search phrases were selected based on the main research question “How are wearable sensors used for health monitoring?” Seven databases were used: Web of Science Core Collection, MEDLINE, Scopus, ScienceDirect, Academic. An overview of search phrases, hits, the article selection process and distribution of articles is provided in Kristoffersson and Lindén (2020b) [11], which focuses on the use of wearable sensors for monitoring and preventing noncommunicable diseases
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