Walking has the potential to be a rich indicator of health in many medical conditions. In recent years, scientific research has proposed more than 100 digital mobility outcomes (DMOs) that could be used to assess walking, and thereby monitor health status, using digital technologies. Though they show great promise, these DMOs require further validation. Researchers must…
Well known biomarkers such as blood pressure, respiration, temperature, pulse, and pain are frequently used by physicians and other health professionals to describe a patient’s health and disease status. In addition to these ‘signs of life’, there is another important aspect of people’s health and disease status, namely their mobility – how well they walk. Loss of physical mobility, such as reduced walking speed, is a significant feature of many health…
Today’s smartwatches and activity bracelets, like FitBit, Apple, and Samsung, have motion sensors that can measure your daily activity. These technologies can tell you how much or little active you are, for example by counting your daily number of steps, heart rate or track your movements with GPS. In both basic and clinical research, similar…
The gait of patients with Parkinson’s Disease is typically assessed in a laboratory but with current developments in sensor technology, their gait could be assessed in the home environment as well. But how comparable are these two? Researchers from University Hospital Erlangen studied this question. In a reliability analysis, they compared standardized and supervised sensor-based…
Walking limitations are debilitating symptoms in many chronic diseases, and are highly related to quality of life, fall risk, and economic burden. Unsurprisingly, walking ability is a common target of pharmacological or behavioural intervention. Thanks to advances in wearable sensor technologies, it is now possible to objectively monitor how, and how much, patients walk in…
Our colleagues from Tel Aviv, the TASMC Mobilisers, studied the quality of walking of people with multiple sclerosis and healthy controls in two environments: a) a well-structured laboratory setting and b) during real-life, everyday walking using 24/7 monitoring. During every-day walking, the patients took fewer steps, they walked more slowly, and the quality of their…
FAU-Mobilisers publish a novel algorithm for the detection of gait from continuous inertial sensor data. The approach allows an efficient and precise processing of real-life gait data. This will facilitate the clinical application of mobile gait analysis in free-living conditions. Read the full paper here.
The expertise of our Mobilisers goes far beyond the Mobilise-D patient groups. Ultimately our findings should benefit anyone with mobility challenges, such as people suffering from Huntington’s Disease. Heiko Gaßner and colleagues explain more in their paper investigating gait variability as digital biomarkers of severity in Huntington’s disease. In this study, characteristic features of gait…
New publication by Rana Zia Ur Rehman & Christopher Buckley with contributors from Mobilise-D! The way we walk (gait) can tell us about our health, risk of falls and brain function, and gait problems are focal in Parkinson’s disease. Gait can be measured using wearable technology (e.g. sensors) and thanks to machine learning models we…
Measuring patients with wearable devices in their unsupervised daily-living environment holds the promise of improving clinical decision making and care of movement disorders, as it can capture fluctuating and rare events in addition to more typical behaviour. However, we still face a few challenges. Read more about these challenges and the steps to overcome them…