Functional Assessment in Elderlies’ Homes: Early Results from a Field Trial

Early results from a field trial regarding the assessment of functional status relevant to self-care ability in domestic environments are presented. A previously developed technical system for unobtrusively recording location information using home automation data was installed in the homes of five participants aged 64–84 years over a period of partially more than nine month. The recordings are manually evaluated to check whether items of geriatric assessment tests relevant to self-care ability can be assessed using the sensor recordings. The evaluation is a preliminary step to develop an automatic assessment algorithm and to develop a model for mapping domestic assessment results to result scales of clinical assessment tests. The mapping is required since most clinical assessment tests are not suitable for execution in domestic environments and thus new approaches are required which do also account for the difference between performance and capacity in functional abilities as proposed within WHO’s ICF.