Evaluation of functional deficits and falls risk in the elderly – methods for preventing falls

Falls in the elderly have a profound impact on their quality of life through injury, increased fear of falling, reduced confidence to perform daily tasks and loss of independence. Falls come at a substantial economic cost. Tools to quantify falls risk and evaluate functional deficits allow interventions to be targeted to those at increased risk of falling and tailored to correct deficits with the aim of reducing falls rate and reducing ones risk of falling. We describe a system to evaluate falls risk and functional deficits in the elderly. The system is based on the evaluation of performance in a simple set of controlled movements known as the directed routine (DR). We present preliminary results of the DR in a cohort of 68 subjects using features extracted from the DR. Linear least-squares models were trained to estimate falls risk, knee-extension strength, proprioception, mediolateral body sway, anteroposterior body sway and contrast sensitivity. The model estimates provided good to fair correlations with (r = 0.76 p<0.001), (r = 0.65 p<0.001), (r = 0.35 p<0.01), (r = 0.53 p<0.001), (r = 0.48 p<0.001) and (r = 0.37 p<0.01) respectively.