Abstract
BackgroundPeople with mobility impairments may have difficulties in everyday life motor activities, and assessing these difficulties is crucial to plan rehabilitation interventions and evaluate their effectiveness. Wearable inertial sensors enable long-term monitoring of motor activities in a patient’s habitual environment and complement clinical assessments which are conducted in a standardised environment. The application of wearable sensors requires appropriate data processing algorithms to estimate clinically meaningful outcome measures, and this review will provide an overview of previously published measures, their underlying algorithms, sensor placement, and measurement properties such as validity, reproducibility, and feasibility.MethodsWe will screen the literature for studies which applied inertial sensors to people with mobility impairments in free-living conditions, described the data processing algorithm reproducibly, and calculated everyday life motor activity-related outcome measures. Three databases (MEDLINE, EMBASE, and SCOPUS) will be searched with terms out of four different categories: study population, measurement tool, algorithm, and outcome measure. s and full texts will be screened independently by the two review authors, and disagreement will be solved by discussion and consensus. Data will be extracted by one of the review authors and verified by the other. It includes the type of outcome measures, the underlying data processing algorithm, the required sensor technology, the corresponding sensor placement, the measurement properties, and the target population. We expect to find a high heterogeneity of outcome measures and will therefore provide a narrative synthesis of the extracted data.DiscussionThis review will facilitate the selection of an appropriate sensor setup for future applications, contain recommendations about the design of data processing algorithms as well as their evaluation procedure, and present a gap for innovative, new algorithms, and devices.Systematic review registrationInternational prospective register of systematic reviews (PROSPERO): CRD42017069865.
Highlights
People with mobility impairments may have difficulties in everyday life motor activities, and assessing these difficulties is crucial to plan rehabilitation interventions and evaluate their effectiveness
Data synthesis The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of all published outcome measures that quantify everyday life motor activity
We expect to find a high heterogeneity of outcome measures to quantify everyday life motor activity and different study designs to evaluate them
Summary
People with mobility impairments may have difficulties in everyday life motor activities, and assessing these difficulties is crucial to plan rehabilitation interventions and evaluate their effectiveness. Wearable inertial sensors enable long-term monitoring of motor activities in a patient’s habitual environment and complement clinical assessments which are conducted in a standardised environment. Clinical assessments to estimate patients’ abilities and their rehabilitation progress are generally conducted in a standardised environment at a single time. They do not incorporate environmental and cognitive challenges of a patient’s habitual environment [3] and might be inaccurate when the symptoms of the patient fluctuate over time [4]. Recent advances in wearable sensor technologies enable objective and long-term monitoring of motor activities in a patient’s habitual environment They provide an opportunity to overcome the aforementioned limitations of clinical assessments and complement their outcome measures
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