Mobile Computing Technologies for Health and Mobility Assessment: Research Design and Results of the Timed Up and Go Test in Older Adults

Abstract

Due to the increasing age of the European population, there is a growing interest in performing research that will aid in the timely and unobtrusive detection of emerging diseases. For such tasks, mobile devices have several sensors, facilitating the acquisition of diverse data. This study focuses on the analysis of the data collected from the mobile devices sensors and a pressure sensor connected to a Bitalino device for the measurement of the Timed-Up and Go test. The data acquisition was performed within different environments from multiple individuals with distinct types of diseases. Then this data was analyzed to estimate the various parameters of the Timed-Up and Go test. Firstly, the pressure sensor is used to extract the reaction and total test time. Secondly, the magnetometer sensors are used to identify the total test time and different parameters related to turning around. Finally, the accelerometer sensor is used to extract the reaction time, total test time, duration of turning around, going time, return time, and many other derived metrics. Our experiments showed that these parameters could be automatically and reliably detected with a mobile device. Moreover, we identified that the time to perform the Timed-Up and Go test increases with age and the presence of diseases related to locomotion.

Keywords: Timed-Up and Go test; accelerometer; diseases; feature detection; magnetometer; mobile devices; older adults; pressure sensor; sensors.

Figure 1

Analysis of reaction time and total test time with pressure sensor by age range.

Figure 2

Analysis of total test time, turning around instant measured by the magnitude of the vector and turning around instant measured by the absolute value of the z-axis with the magnetometer sensor by age range.

Figure 3

Analysis of reaction time and total test time with a pressure sensor.

Figure 4

Analysis of total test time turning around instant by the magnitude of the vector and turning around instant by the absolute value of the z-axis with the magnetometer sensor.