Volume 10, Number 19, December 2020

Assessing the Mobility of Elderly People in Domestic Smart Home Environments

  Authors

Björn Friedrich, Enno-Edzard Steen, Sebastian Fudickar and Andreas Hein, Carl von Ossietzky University, Germany

  Abstract

A continuous monitoring of the physical strength and mobility of elderly people is important for maintaining their health and treating diseases at an early stage. However, frequent screenings by physicians are exceeding the logistic capacities. An alternate approach is the automatic and unobtrusive collection of functional measures by ambient sensors. In the current publication, we show the correlation among data of ambient motion sensors and the wellestablished mobility assessment Short-Physical-Performance-Battery and Tinetti. We use the average number of motion sensor events for correlation with the assessment scores. The evaluation on a real-world dataset shows a moderate to strong correlation with the scores of standardised geriatrics physical assessments.

  Keywords

ubiquitous computing, biomedical informatics, health, correlation, piecewise linear approximation.