Age and environment-related differences in gait in healthy adults using wearables
Date/Time
July 21, 2021
Discussion Topic
Do we fully understand the sensitivity of gait speed as a potential endpoint for clinical trials studies? Matthew D. Czech, Isik Karahanoglu, Xuemei Cai, Charmaine Demanuele, and their colleagues aimed to find out through their recent study, “Age and environment-related differences in gait in healthy adults using wearables” in NPJ. Their work shows that a single lumbar-worn sensor can be used for monitoring gait under free-living conditions and capture meaningful information about real-world functions that might not be possible in controlled settings. Their work also shows that despite higher variability, at-home gait speed was able to capture age-related group differences in healthy volunteers, which were not observed during in-lab gait assessments. Furthermore, they present the statistical methodology for deriving the number of monitoring days required to reliably estimate at-home gait speed that can be used to optimize clinical study design.
