There are a great deal of methods to try to mathematically quantify exactly how healthy a person is. things like resting pulse rate, blood pressure, as well as blood oxygenation are all rather simple to determine as well as can be utilized to anticipate different clinical outcomes. However, one you may not have thought about is gait velocity, or the speed at which a person walks. It turns out gait velocity is a viable method to anticipate the onset of a wide range of conditions, such as congestive heart failure or chronic obtrusive pulmonary disease. It turns out, as people ended up being sick, elderly or infirm, they tend to walk slower – just like the bit riflemen in your favourite RTS when their healthbar’s method in the red. however exactly how does one determine this? MIT’s CSAIL has stepped up, with a method to determine walking speed totally wirelessly.
You can checked out the paper here (PDF). The WiGate gadget sends out a low-power radio signal, as well as then measures the reflections to determine a person’s place over time. Alone, however, this is not sufficient – it’s important to measure the walking speed specifically, to prevent false positives being triggered by a person just not moving while watching television, for example. Algorithms are utilized to separate walking activity from the data set, enabling the gadget to sit in the background, recording walking speed data without any individual interaction needed whatsoever.
This type of passive tracking might have excellent applications in nursing homes, where personnel commonly have a significant number of patients to monitor. It would enable the collection of clinically appropriate data without the requirement for any type of human intervention; the gadget might just alert personnel when a patient’s walking pattern is indicative of a bigger problem.
We see some excellent health and wellness research study right here at Hackaday – such as this open source ECG. video after the break.