Evaluation of the Importance of Stopping Elderly Accidents, Deaths, and Injuries (STEADI)-Based Factors in Wearable Fall Risk Assessment: Secondary Data Analysis.

backgroundFalls among older adults are a growing and costly public health problem that often leads to mobility decline and loss of independence. Although clinical frameworks such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Stopping Elderly Accidents, Deaths, and Injuries (STEADI) initiative recommend multifactor screening (gait, balance, strength, fear of falling, and fall history), most wearable fall risk assessment systems rely on a small set of risk factors (typically gait), which creates a gap between clinical practice and automated wearable assessment.

objectiveThis study aims to evaluate the importance of STEADI-based fall risk factors and provide design guidance for clinically compatible wearable fall risk assessment systems.

methodsWe created a dataset of 24 older adults (10 low fall risk and 14 high fall risk) from a publicly available plantar pressure dataset of 48 participants by retaining only those with consistent fall risk labels based on both the Berg Balance Scale and the Timed Up and Go test. A total of 18 features were extracted to quantify gait, strength, balance, fear of falling, and fall history. Random forest (RF) models were trained with leave-one-subject-out cross-validation to assess fall risk. Importance of STEADI-based factors was assessed by two methods: (1) estimating Shapley Additive Explanations values based on a single RF model trained on all features; and (2) training 5 separate RF models, each on 1 STEADI factor category, and comparing their fall risk classification accuracies.

resultsIn this secondary analysis, the RF model trained on all features achieved a subject-level accuracy of 87.53% (95% CI 75%-100%). Shapley Additive Explanations analysis identified the right foot flat phase ratio (fear of falling feature) as the highest-ranked feature, followed by maximum right forefoot ground reaction force (strength feature), whereas traditional gait features did not appear in the top 10. The 5 separate RF models trained on individual STEADI-based factor categories showed a similar trend in mean participant-level accuracy: fear of falling, 87.59% (95% CI 75%-100%); strength, 79.18% (95% CI 62.5%-95.83%); balance, 70.5% (95% CI 50%-87.5%); gait 70.81% (95% CI 54.17%-87.5%); and fall history 62.37% (95% CI 50%-75.1%). However, paired comparisons did not show statistically significant differences in accuracy between the gait model and the models trained on other factors.

conclusionsThese preliminary results show that commonly overlooked nongait factors are potentially as informative as gait, although clear superiority was not demonstrated in this dataset. The novel foot flat phase ratio ranked higher than all other evaluated features, which showed the value of domain knowledge-informed feature engineering. These preliminary findings indicate that nongait STEADI factors merit consideration in the design of wearable fall risk assessment systems.