Communications of the ACM
A Smartphone to Help Keep the Elderly Safe
Rutgers University researchers are developing a smartphone app that would assess seniors' balance and help keep them from falling.
Credit: Rutgers Today
A team of researchers at Rutgers University is developing a smartphone app that could help keep senior citizens from falling.
The tool would assess balance during daily activities, such as standing up, sitting down, and walking.
The app uses sensors in a strapped-on smartphone to measure body movements such as sway, jerkiness, or acceleration, which can trigger loss of balance, and detects the rate of change in movements using the device's gyroscope.
The researchers tested the app on six individuals ranging in age from 76 to 94 and found isolating movement patterns immediately before a change in balance could help predict when a person is about to fall.
The team says they will use the recorded sway movements and acceleration of motion, along with blood pressure readings, to build a predictive model of falling.
"What I love about this type of application is that it is objective--and the data never lie," says Rutgers professor William Craelius. "It should allow us to establish a baseline for patterns of movement and a repository of readings that we can easily manage in a database."
From Rutgers Today
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2016 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found