Abstract
The assessment of mobility and functional impairments in the elderly is important for early detection and prevention of fall conditions. Falls create serious threats to health by causing disabling fractures that reduce independence in the elderly. Moreover, they exert heavy economic burdens on society due to high treatment costs. Modern smartphones enable the development of innovative mobile health (mHealth) applications by integrating a growing number of inertial and environmental sensors along with the ever-increasing data processing and communication capabilities. Mobility assessment is one of the promising mHealth application domains. In this paper, we introduce a suite of smartphone applications for assessing mobility in the elderly population. The suite currently includes smartphone applications that automate and quantify the following standardized medical tests for assessing mobility: Timed Up and Go (TUG), 30-Second Chair Stand Test (30SCS), and 4-Stage Balance Test (4SBT). For each application, we describe its functionality and a list of parameters extracted by processing signals from smartphone’s inertial sensors. The paper shows the results from studies conducted on geriatric patients for TUG tests and from experiments conducted in the laboratory on healthy subjects for 30SCS and 4SBT tests.
Highlights
The quality of life of the elderly is highly correlated with their mobility
The total costs resulting from falls were in the range of 0.85 to 1.5 percent of the total healthcare costs in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and the European Union (EU) in 2009 [3]
The suite includes applications for automating and quantifying standard mobility tests recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): Timed Up and Go (TUG), 30-Second Chair Stand
Summary
The quality of life of the elderly is highly correlated with their mobility. Reduced mobility creates serious risk of fall. Automatic activity recognition and quantification systems that utilize inertial sensors are proposed for long-term health and fitness monitoring [15,16,17], assessment of mobility in the elderly and people with Parkinson’s disease [18,19], automatic fall detection [20,21], and rehabilitation [22,23]. The suite includes applications for automating and quantifying standard mobility tests recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): Timed Up and Go (TUG), 30-Second Chair Stand. With automatic updates to an mHealth server over the Internet and services provided by the mHealth web portal, healthcare professionals can gain insights into mobility of tested subjects over time They can assess the impact of therapeutic interventions, e.g., impact of drugs, by analyzing the parameters from multiple tests performed in a single day.
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