Validity of accelerometry in step detection and gait speed measurement in orthogeriatric patients

BACKGROUND: Mobile accelerometry is a powerful and promising option to capture long-term changes in gait in both clinical and real-world scenarios. Increasingly, gait parameters have demonstrated their value as clinical outcome parameters, but validation of these parameters in elderly patients is still limited. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to implement a validation framework appropriate for elderly patients and representative of real-world settings, and to use this framework to test and improve algorithms for mobile accelerometry data in an orthogeriatric population. METHODS: Twenty elderly subjects wearing a 3D-accelerometer completed a parcours imitating a real-world scenario. High-definition video and mobile reference speed capture served to validate different algorithms. RESULTS: Particularly at slow gait speeds, relevant improvements in accuracy have been achieved. Compared to the reference the deviation was less than 1% in step detection and less than 0.05 m/s in gait speed measurements, even for slow walking subjects (< 0.8 m/s). CONCLUSION: With the described setup, algorithms for step and gait speed detection have successfully been validated in an elderly population and demonstrated to have improved performance versus previously published algorithms. These results are promising that long-term and/or real-world measurements are possible with an acceptable accuracy even in elderly frail patients with slow gait speeds.