Protocol of a systematic review on the application of wearable inertial sensors to quantify everyday life motor activity in people with mobility impairments

BACKGROUND: People with mobility impairments may have difficulties in everyday life motor activities, and assessing these difficulties is crucial to plan rehabilitation interventions and evaluate their effectiveness. Wearable inertial sensors enable long-term monitoring of motor activities in a patient’s habitual environment and complement clinical assessments which are conducted in a standardised environment. The application of wearable sensors requires appropriate data processing algorithms to estimate clinically meaningful outcome measures, and this review will provide an overview of previously published measures, their underlying algorithms, sensor placement, and measurement properties such as validity, reproducibility, and feasibility. METHODS: We will screen the literature for studies which applied inertial sensors to people with mobility impairments in free-living conditions, described the data processing algorithm reproducibly, and calculated everyday life motor activity-related outcome measures. Three databases (MEDLINE, EMBASE, and SCOPUS) will be searched with terms out of four different categories: study population, measurement tool, algorithm, and outcome measure. Abstracts and full texts will be screened independently by the two review authors, and disagreement will be solved by discussion and consensus. Data will be extracted by one of the review authors and verified by the other. It includes the type of outcome measures, the underlying data processing algorithm, the required sensor technology, the corresponding sensor placement, the measurement properties, and the target population. We expect to find a high heterogeneity of outcome measures and will therefore provide a narrative synthesis of the extracted data. DISCUSSION: This review will facilitate the selection of an appropriate sensor setup for future applications, contain recommendations about the design of data processing algorithms as well as their evaluation procedure, and present a gap for innovative, new algorithms, and devices. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: International prospective register of systematic reviews (PROSPERO): CRD42017069865. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s13643-018-0824-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.