Communications of the ACM
Gaittrack App Makes Cellphone a Medical Monitor For Heart and Lung Patients
A screenshot of the GaitTrack app, which monitors how heart and lung patients walk, a key metric for physicians.
Credit: Bruce Schatz
University of Illinois at Chicago researchers have developed GaitTrack, an app that turns a smartphone into a medical monitor. GaitTrack uses eight motion parameters to perform a detailed analysis of a person's gait, which can tell physicians a lot about a patient's cardiopulmonary, muscular, and neurological health.
The researchers used GaitTrack to administer six-minute walk tests to 30 patients with chronic lung disease and found that it monitored more accurately, and less expensively, than conventional medical accelerometers. In addition, the researchers found that analyzing gait data could predict lung function with 90-percent accuracy.
"The original plan was just to validate the software against the standard medical walk test, but we looked at other data and found that it matched well with a pulmonary function test called FEV1," says Illinois professor Bruce Schatz. "Predicting FEV1 is useful because that's the standard number used to determine treatment. That's worth a lot to a health system."
The researchers currently are testing GaitTrack in larger trials within health systems, and they hope to have the app available for download in the near future.
From University of Illinois News Bureau
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