Application of Wearable Inertial Sensors and A New Test Battery for Distinguishing Retrospective Fallers from Non-fallers among Community-dwelling Older People

Considering the challenge of population ageing and the substantial health problem among the elderly population from falls, the purpose of this study was to verify whether it is possible to distinguish accurately between older fallers and non-fallers, based on data from wearable inertial sensors collected during a specially designed test battery. A comprehensive but practical test battery using 5 wearable inertial sensors for multifactorial fall risk assessment was designed. This was followed by an experimental study on 196 community-dwelling Korean older women, categorized as fallers (N1 = 82) and non-fallers (N2 = 114) based on prior history of falls. Six machine learning models (logistic regression, naïve bayes, decision tree, random forest, boosted tree and support vector machine) were proposed for faller classification. Results indicated that compared with non-fallers, fallers performed significantly worse on the test battery. In addition, the application of sensor data and support vector machine for faller classification achieved an overall accuracy of 89.4% with 92.7% sensitivity and 84.9% specificity. These findings suggest that wearable inertial sensor based systems show promise for elderly fall risk assessment, which could be implemented in clinical practice to identify “at-risk” individuals reliably to promote proactive fall prevention.