Semi-automated Video-based In-home Fall Risk Assessment

The development of an in-home fall risk assessment tool is under in- vestigation. Several fall risk screening tests such as the Timed-Get-Up-and-Go-test (TGUG) only provide a snapshot taken at a given time and place, where automated in-home fall risk assessment tools can assess the fall risk of a person on a contin- uous basis. During this study we monitored four older people in their own home for a period of three months and automatically assessed fall risk parameters. We selected a subset of fixed walking sequences from the resulting real-life video for analysis of the time needed to perform these sequences. The results show a sig- nificant diurnal and health-related variance in the time needed to cross the same distance. These results also suggest that trends in the transfer time can be detected with the presented system.