Citation

Narayanan MR, Scalzi ME, Redmond SJ, Lord SR, Celler BG, Lovell NH. Conf. Proc. IEEE Eng. Med. Biol. Soc. 2008; 2008: 2840-2843.

Affiliation

Biomedical Systems Laboratory, School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW, Australia.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers))

DOI

10.1109/IEMBS.2008.4649794

PMID

19163297

Abstract

Falls-related injuries in the elderly population are a major cause of morbidity and represent one of the most significant contributors to hospitalizations and rising health care expense in developed countries. Many laboratory-based studies have described falls detection systems using wearable accelerometry. However, only a limited number of reports have tried to address the difficult issues of falls detection and falls prevention in unsupervised or free-living environments. We describe a waist-mounted triaxial accelerometry (Triax) system with a remote data collection capability to provide unsupervised monitoring of the elderly. The basis of the monitoring is a self-administered directed-routine (DR) comprising three separate tests measured by way of the Triax. We present an initial evaluation of the DR results in 36 patients to detect early changes in functional ability and facilitate falls risk stratification. Extracted features considered alone show a correlation with falls risk of approximately rho=0.5. Estimation of falls risk using a linear least squares model provides a root-mean-squared error of 0.69 (rho=0.58, p<0.0002).

Language: en