A system for monitoring the functional status of older adults in daily life

Abstract

Functional decline in older adults can lead to an increased need of assistance or even moving to a nursing home. Utilising home automation, power and wearable sensors, our system continuously keeps track of the functional status of older adults through monitoring their daily life and allows health care professionals to create individualised rehabilitation programmes based on the changes in the older adult’s functional capacity and performance in daily life. The system uses the taxonomy of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) by the World Health Organization (WHO). It links sensor data to five ICF items from three ICF categories and measures their change over time. We collected data from 20 (pre-)frail older adults (aged $$\ge$$ ≥ 75 years) during a 10-month observational randomised pilot intervention study. The system successfully passed the first pre-clinical validation step on the real-world data of the OTAGO study. Furthermore, an initial test with a medical professional showed that the system is intuitive and can be used to design personalised rehabilitation measures. Since this research is in an early stage further clinical studies are needed to fully validate the system.