Wearables for independent living in older adults: Gait and falls

Abstract

Solutions are needed to satisfy care demands of older adults to live independently. Wearable technology (wearables) are one approach to offer a viable means for ubiquitous, sustainable and scalable monitoring in habitual free-living environments. Gait has been presented as a relevant (bio) marker in ageing and pathological studies, with objective assessment achievable by inertial-based wearables. Commercial wearables have struggled to provide accurate analytics and have been limited by non-clinically oriented gait outcomes. Moreover, some research grade wearables also fail to provide transparent functionality due to limitations in proprietary software. Innovation within this field is often sporadic with large heterogeneity of wearable types and algorithms for gait outcomes leading to a lack of pragmatic use. This review provides a summary of recent wearable gait assessment literature, focusing on the need for an algorithm fusion approach to measurement cumulating in the ability to better detect and classify falls. A brief presentation of wearables in one pathological group is presented, identifying appropriate work for researchers in other cohorts to utilise. Opportunities for how this domain needs to progress are also summarised. Highlights• Wearables can meet older adults' needs for independent living.• Gait assessment is a (bio)marker within ageing and different pathologies.• Measuring gait with wearables has been innovative but fraught with inconsistencies.

Levels of physical activity and sleep patterns among older people with dementia living in long-term care facilities: A 24-h snapshot

“…The inclusion of a large sample -415 residents from 28 long-term care facilities and with varying levels of cognitive impairment -may have contributed to the higher rate of non-adherence we observed. Our findings and experiences during the study highlight the challenge of using wearable technology with cognitively impaired individuals and supports, more broadly, the need for more work in this area, particularly regarding practical issues such as device size, placement, and comfort [31].…”

Home‐Based Monitoring of Falls Using Wearable Sensors in Parkinson's Disease

“…33 Consequently, monitoring with sensors may increase timely referral to falls prevention programs, aiming to decrease the impact of falls on daily life and increase independence. 34 This potential of sensors becomes more important when considering the higher number of falls in participants with PD resulting in emergency transport that was observed in our study. Future research focusing on refining algorithms for fall detection, fall prediction, and fall risk analysis in daily living should explore the added value of tri-axial gyroscopes and/or tri-axial magnetometers.…”

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