Quantitative Frailty Assessment Based on Kinematic Parameters of Daily Living Activities

Frailty is a prevailing phenomena in older people. It is an age related syndrome that can increase the risk of fall in elderly. The people with age above 65 suffers from various functional decline and cognitive impairments. Such deficiencies are conventionally measured subjectively by geriatrics using questionnaire-based methods and clinical tests. Activities of daily living are also assessed in clinical settings by analysing simple tasks performed by the subject such as sit to stand and walking some distances. The clinical methods used to assess frailty and analyse the activity of daily living are subjective in nature and prone to human error. An objective method is proposed to quantitatively measure frailty using inertial sensor mounted on healthy, frail and nonfrail subjects while performing the sit to stand test (SiSt). An artificial neural networks based algorithm is developed to classify the frailty by extracting a unique set of features from 2D -Centre of Mass (CoM) trajectories derived from SiSt clinical test. The results indicate that the proposed algorithms provides an objective assessment of frailty that can be used by geriatrics in turn to make a more objective judgement of frailty status of older people.