Multimodal, Task-Aware Movement Quality Assessment and Control: From the Clinic to the Home

Overview

The goal of the project is to develop a novel, distributed sensor platform that continuously assesses movement in the background of one’s life and facilitates personalized, ”smart” intervention when detecting movement dysfunctions and functional decline, with the goal of helping people age in place and avoid expensive and lengthy hospitalizations.

Motivation

Frail older adults constitute the sickest, most expensive, and fastest growing segment of the US population. However, the US health care system fails on most counts to promptly detect and act on the loss of function and the onset of frailty. It instead reacts to catastrophic events with intensive, high-cost, hospital- and institution-based interventions. Home-based technologies that enable timely diagnosis of the functional decline and movement dysfunctions that are known to precipitate the onset of frailty are desperately needed to facilitate aging in place. Moreover, next-generation powered assistive technologies are emerging as promising tools for both assistance and rehabilitation. Current solutions, however, are limited to specific actions (walking) in controlled conditions, and depend on body-worn sensors that provide limited context for control. These limitations render unconstrained use of these devices in free-living settings as a distant vision.

Aims

1. 1. Develop a multimodal sensor platform that fuses data and recognizes basic actions from body-worn sensors and external cameras.
   2. Test the platform in a clinical setting to enable activity- and context-aware motion assessment and control across a range of walking-related activities (e.g., sit-to-stand, walking, turning, stairs).
   3. Test the platform in home-based deployments to enable caregiver alerts in response to detected functional decline.

Funding and support

This project is supported by the National Institute of Health/National Institute on Aging grant “SCH: Multimodal,Task-Aware Movement Assessment and Control: Clinic to Home”.

Start date: September 30th, 2010
End date: May 31st, 2023