Abstract
The use of walking aids is prevalent among older people and people with mobility impairment. Rollators are designed to support outdoor mobility and require the user to negotiate curbs and slopes in the urban environment. Despite the prevalence of rollators, analysis of their use outside of controlled environments has received relatively little attention. This Letter reports on an initial study to characterise rollator movement. An inertial measurement unit (IMU) was used to measure the motion of the rollator and analytical approaches were developed to extract features characterising the rollator movement, properties of the surface and push events. The analytics were tested in two situations: first, a healthy participant used a rollator in a laboratory using a motion capture system to obtain ground truth. Second, the IMU was used to measure the movement of a rollator being used by a user with multiple sclerosis on a flat surface, cross-slope, up and down slopes and up and down a step. The results showed that surface inclination and distance travelled measured by the IMU have close approximation to the results from ground truth; therefore, demonstrating the potential for IMU-derived metrics to characterise rollator movement and user's pushing style in the outdoor environment.
Highlights
In the United States ∼4.2 million older adults use at least one walking aid, with a view to reducing fall risk and/or enhancing mobility [1]
Data analysis: The results of the gold standard testing from the motion capture system served as the ground truth to examine the analysis of the inertial measurement unit (IMU) data for distance travelled, whilst the known characteristics of the surface of the simulated urban environment (SUE) served as ground truth for surface detection
The work presented in this Letter provides a first examination of the interaction between the rollator, the user and the environment using potable IMUs to characterise the rollator movements
Summary
In the United States ∼4.2 million older adults use at least one walking aid, with a view to reducing fall risk and/or enhancing mobility [1]. Despite the recent advances in low-cost computing and sensing, there is no data on the patterns of use of rollator devices outside of controlled environments, whereas in other areas of mobility aids research such as wheelchairs the usage and activity levels can be measured by accelerometers and inertial measurement units (IMUs) [13,14,15]. This is very surprising, given the high prevalence of rollators amongst older people and recent studies that indicate the potential for increased trip or fall risk outside of the laboratory [11, 12]. The second experiment applies this technique to one rollator user with MS in a simulated urban environment (SUE) and demonstrates the potential to obtain information on the environment including surface slope and curb crossing events from a rollator-mounted sensor, in addition to the basic gait features
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