ArticlePLOS digital health2024
Comparison of professional and everyday wearable technology at different body positions in terms of recording gait perturbations.
Article in PLOS digital health, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Association of depressive symptoms, gait and dynamic balance with risk of falling in older adults discharged from the emergency department after a fall: a prospective observational study.BMC geriatrics · 2026Observational
- Tailored interventions to prevent functional decline after a Sentinel Fall presenting to the Emergency Department (iSeFallED) - protocol for a pragmatic mixed-methods implementation study.BMC geriatrics · 2026Article
- Effect of simultaneous physical and auditory stressors on cardiorespiratory response.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Automatic Detection of Gait Perturbations With Everyday Wearable Technology.IEEE open journal of engineering in medicine and biology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Falls are a significant health problem in older people, so preventing them is essential. Since falls are often a consequence of improper reaction to gait disturbances, such as slips and trips, their detection is gaining attention in research. However there are no studies to date that investigated perturbation detection, using everyday wearable devices like hearing aids or smartphones at different body positions. Sixty-six study participants were perturbed on a split-belt treadmill while recording data with hearing aids, smartphones, and professional inertial measurement units (IMUs) at various positions (left/right ear, jacket pocket, shoulder bag, pants pocket, left/right foot, left/right wrist, lumbar, sternum). The data were visually inspected and median maximum cross-correlations were calculated for whole trials and different perturbation conditions. The results show that the hearing aids and IMUs perform equally in measuring acceleration data (correlation coefficient of 0.93 for the left hearing aid and 0.99 for the right hearing aid), which emphasizes the potential of utilizing sensors in hearing aids for head acceleration measurements. Additionally, the data implicate that measurement with a single hearing aid is sufficient and a second hearing aid provides no added value. Furthermore, the acceleration patterns were similar for the ear position, the jacket pocket position, and the lumbar (correlation coefficient of about 0.8) or sternal position (correlation coefficient of about 0.9). The correlations were found to be more or less independent of the type of perturbation. Data obtained from everyday wearable devices appears to represent the movements of the human body during perturbations similar to that of professional devices. The results suggest that IMUs in hearing aids and smartphones, placed at the trunk, could be well suited for an automatic detection of gait perturbations.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.