Mertens Marc, Raepsaet Julie, Debard Glen, Mondelaers Mieke, Vanrumste Bart, Davis Jesse
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2019 Jul;2019:3187-3190. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2019.8856337.
Fall incidents with elderly suffering from psychological pathologies, in combination with a comorbidity of clinical problems are highly prevalent. In our research setting, the psychiatric hospital OPZ in Geel, Belgium, 1790 fall incidents were recorded with 283 patients since 2013. The nature of the patients' profiles makes a valid, objective fall risk assessment very difficult; for them, instructions to perform the tests are difficult to understand and execute. Therefore, the currently used instruments are not suited for this complex situation. In this study we propose an alternative system for the assessment of fall risk for patients of a psychogeriatric ward. We also study the essential precautions needed for acceptance of wearables in this complex setting.We collected individual daily mean gait speeds of 17 patients at a psychogeriatric ward over a period of five months. We show that it is possible, using wearable technology, to measure individual gait speed. We also show that it is possible to have the wearable technology accepted by the target group. The results obtained so far are promising to use automatical gait measurement to correlate to the currently used risk assessment tests and to eventually replace these tests.
患有心理疾病且合并临床问题的老年人跌倒事件非常普遍。在我们的研究环境中，比利时海尔的精神病医院OPZ自2013年以来记录了283名患者的1790起跌倒事件。患者的情况使得进行有效的、客观的跌倒风险评估非常困难；对他们来说，执行测试的指示很难理解和执行。因此，目前使用的工具并不适用于这种复杂的情况。在本研究中，我们提出了一种用于评估老年精神科病房患者跌倒风险的替代系统。我们还研究了在这种复杂环境中接受可穿戴设备所需的基本预防措施。我们收集了17名老年精神科病房患者在五个月内的每日平均步态速度。我们表明，使用可穿戴技术可以测量个体步态速度。我们还表明，可穿戴技术有可能被目标群体接受。到目前为止获得的结果有望利用自动步态测量与目前使用的风险评估测试相关联，并最终取代这些测试。
