An efficient home-based risk of falling assessment test based on Smartphone and instrumented insole

Abstract

The aim of this study is to improve and facilitate the methods used to assess risk of falling among older people at home. We propose an automatic version of One-Leg Standing (OLS) test for risk of falling assessment by using a Smartphone and an instrumented insole. For better clinical assessment tests, this study focuses on exploring methods to combine the most important parameters of risk of falling into a single score. Twenty-three volunteers participated in this study for evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed system which includes eleven elderly participants: seven healthy elderly (67.16 ± 4.24 years), four Parkinson disease (PD) subjects (70 ± 12.73 years); and twelve healthy young adults (28.27 ± 3.74 years). Our work suggests that there is an inverse relationship between OLS score proposed and risk of falling. Proposed instrumented insole and application running on Android could be useful at home as a diagnostic aid tool for analyzing the performance of elderly people in OLS test.