Frailty Assessment in Daily Living (FRAIL) - Assessment of ADL Performance of Frail Elderly with IMUs

Frailty is accompanied by limitations in activities of daily living (ADL). These are associated with reduced quality of life, institutionalization and higher health care costs. Long-term monitoring ADL could allow creating effective interventions and thus reduce the occurrence of adverse health outcomes. The main objective of this study was to evaluate if ADL task performance can be assessed by activity measurements based on IMUs, and whether these measures can differentiate individual’s frailty. ADL data was obtained from seventeen elderly who performed two ADL tasks - tea making task (TEA) and gardening task (GARDEN). Acceleration data of the dominant hand was collected using an activity sensor. Participants were split up in two groups, FRAIL (n = 6; Fried score ≥ 2) and CONTROL (n = 11; Fried score ≤ 1) retrospectively. Collected data were used to determine trial duration (TD), relative activity (RA), peak standard deviation (STD), peaks per second (PPS), peaks ratio (RATIO), weighted sum of acceleration per second (SUM), signal to noise ratio (S2N) and mean peak acceleration (MPA). STD, RATIO, SUM and MPA showed good reliability over both tasks. Four of the calculated parameters (RA, PPS, RATIO, SUM) revealed significant results differentiating between FRAIL and CONTROL (effect sizes 1.30–1.77). Multiple linear regression showed that only STD correlated with the Fried score. In summary, the results demonstrate that ADL task performance can be assessed by IMU-based activity measures and further allows drawing conclusions on the frailty status of elderly, although the predictability of the exact Fried score was limited.