There are few things more threatening to the elderly
than falls. When elderly people fall, they run the risk of broken bones, head
injury, and even death-and they know it. That's why falls have serious psychological
as well as physical consequences. Fear of falling can lead the elderly to become
homebound and isolated, as they seek to avoid situations in which they may be
jostled.
Certainly
such aids as handrails in bathtubs and tacking down scatter rugs can reduce the
incidence of falls, but we know very little about the process of falling itself
and the gait patterns that make people prone to falling. Motion-capture equipment
used to analyze gait, combining extremely sensitive treadmills and arrays of highly
sensitive video cameras, do an excellent job, but such equipment is extremely
expensive and limited in its application.
The gait laboratory at the University's
Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation is one of the best in the nation,
yet even here patients and subjects can only be viewed one at a time, making it
difficult to produce statistically significant results. At the same time, the
setting is artificial; people don't walk on a treadmill under the watchful eyes
of researchers the same way they might walk through a shopping mall.
Jim
Aylor and John Lach, both faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering, are working to design a wearable system that will supplement these
results. Their wearable device will collect gait data from miniature sensors distributed
across the body and store it in a memory element on the wearer's belt. It can
be worn throughout the day, in any setting, for weeks at a time if necessary,
and provide data on falls as they actually occur. "Preliminary tests on our
prototype show that it is quite sensitive," reports Lach. "Our next
step is to take it into the gait laboratory and work with the laboratory's director,
Dr. Casey Kerrigan, to validate it against the existing equipment."
Aylor's
and Lach's ultimate goal, however, is not simply to further gait research. The
need for a wearable, inexpensive system that can produce detailed, real-world
data is widespread across medical research. "We want to design a system that
can be easily adapted to a variety of applications," says Aylor.
To
understand the requirements of such a system Aylor and Lach are working with University
researchers in a number of fields. For instance, they are collaborating with psychology
professor Timothy Salthouse to better determine the causes of cognitive fluctuation
during the course of a day. Salthouse has his subjects carry Palm Pilots that
are programmed to administer cognition tests, allowing for portable assessments
over an extended period of time. Aylor and Lach are creating a complementary wearable
system that would simultaneously measure medical data like pulse rate and blood
pressure as well as ambient environmental conditions like temperature and humidity.
Readings from their device would provide clues to the environmental factors that
impact cognition.
"The idea is to combine off-the-shelf technology to
create a system that would be flexible, robust, and highly accurate," says
Lach. "Our purpose is to increase both the quantity and the quality of the
data that medical researchers have at their disposal." system, Aylor and
Lach are working with University researchers in a number of fields.
