Exploring & designing tools to enhance falls rehabilitation in the home

Abstract

Falls are the leading cause of accidental injury-related deaths in the elderly; a fall can lead to a loss of independence, and a fear of falling. Rehabilitation programmes involving exercise have proved the most successful way to reduce the risk of falls. However, the limitations of standard care (e.g. booklets) could prevent home users from receiving the full therapeutic benefit that rehabilitation offers. Having consulted users and health experts, we developed games, and visualizations for falls rehabilitation that we believe could potentially overcome the main barriers to effective rehabilitation in the home. In this paper, we describe user studies that we carried out with older adults to evaluate the use of these visual tools versus standard care, both in the laboratory and in the home. Our main findings show that our visualizations and games were able to overcome the major limitations of standard care, and that they were usable and acceptable to the end users.

Designing a Wellness Self-Management Tool for Older Adults – Results from a Field Trial of YourWellness

“…There is also much research in the space of health applications targeted specifically at older people including those to support functional ability [16] physical [7,29], social [9] or cognitive wellbeing [12]. While some of these systems provide feedback to support health improvement, their long-term usage in real environments is limited.…”

“…However, to varying degrees, national health and social care systems are preparing for potentially higher incidences of chronic disease, such as diabetes, arthritis and COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and resulting dependency problems. For example, the incidence of diabetes is set to double between 2005 and 2030 to an estimated number of 366 million people living with diabetes in 2030 [29]. There is a cost element.…”

Custom-designed motion-based games for older adults: A review of literature in human-computer interaction

“…Uzor et al 43 present a game-based approach toward falls rehabilitation for older adults. Their results show that video games are a suited to encourage stroke rehabilitation among this audience; comments of older adults showed a positive response to game-based rehabilitation compared to traditional approaches such as the use of booklets.…”

Sensing and Sensor Fundamentals

“…Kinematic sensors can be used in the assessment of prosthetic limb replacements (Arami, et al, 2013). They are also used in stroke rehabilitation to monitor the performance of targeted physical exercises (Uzor, et al, 2013) (Shyamal, et al, 2012). Sensors have also be been printed onto fabrics for motion-detection applications (Wei, et al, 2013) (Metcalf, et al, 2009).…”