Abstract
In recent years, the meaning of successful living has moved from extending lifetime to improving the quality of aging, mainly in terms of high cognitive and physical functioning together with avoiding diseases. In healthy elderly, falls represent an alarming accident both in terms of number of events and the consequent decrease in the quality of life. Stability control is a key approach for studying the genesis of falls, for detecting the event and trying to develop methodologies to prevent it. Wearable sensors have proved to be very useful in monitoring and analyzing the stability of subjects. Within this manuscript, a review of the approaches proposed in the literature for fall risk assessment, fall prevention and fall detection in healthy elderly is provided. The review has been carried out by using the most adopted publication databases and by defining a search strategy based on keywords and boolean algebra constructs. The analysis aims at evaluating the state of the art of such kind of monitoring, both in terms of most adopted sensor technologies and of their location on the human body. The review has been extended to both dynamic and static analyses. In order to provide a useful tool for researchers involved in this field, the manuscript also focuses on the tests conducted in the analyzed studies, mainly in terms of characteristics of the population involved and of the tasks used. Finally, the main trends related to sensor typology, sensor location and tasks have been identified.
Highlights
Falls and related accidents are a common and serious problem in a pathologic condition like Parkinson’s Disease [1], stroke [2] or multiple sclerosis [3], in which they are due to the motor and cognitive characteristics of the specific disease, and for healthy people aged 65 and over [4]
Some falls are probably unavoidable, most of them are due to the combination of intrinsic and extrinsic risk factors [11]
Musculoskeletal weakness [13] and decline of cognitive functions are known to be correlated with falls risk [14]
Summary
Falls and related accidents are a common and serious problem in a pathologic condition like Parkinson’s Disease [1], stroke [2] or multiple sclerosis [3], in which they are due to the motor and cognitive characteristics of the specific disease, and for healthy people aged 65 and over [4]. Some falls are probably unavoidable, most of them are due to the combination of intrinsic and extrinsic risk factors [11]. Intrinsic risk factors are related to the subject’s characteristics, which include immutable biological features, sedentary lifestyle, concomitant presence of pathologies and use of medicines, age-related changes such as cognitive impairment, gait pattern alterations, and inability to maintain postural stability [12]. A close relationship between motor and cognitive functions in both healthy elders and cognition-compromised subjects has been observed [15,16]
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