The United States population is growing older. There is an urgent need for tools to better connect health professionals with their patients and perform at-home assessments in an automated fashion. The long-term goal of this proposal is to discover the knowledge necessary to enable an always-on, non-intrusive, non-wearable smart system for automated at-home gait parameter estimation using floor vibrations. To achieve this vision, the proposal has the objective of connecting health professionals with older adults living independently through a smart system that estimates gait parameters using floor vibration. The aims to achieve this goal are to 1) determine at-home gait parameters as a function of time and space; 2) establish a digital identifier of the older adult based on gait parameters; and 3) correlate changes in at-home gait parameters, after considering spatial-temporal correlations, with changes in the well-being of the resident. The proposed research will advance the state-of-the-art in engineering, physical therapy and public health by testing the following hypotheses: 1) Floor vibration is a viable means to automatically and continuously determine gait parameters; 2) For healthy individuals living in an independent at-home setting, gait parameters will be consistent based on location in the home, time of the day and day of the week; and 3) For patients recently discharged from the hospital, recovery will correlate with improvements in their gait parameters. The testing of the hypotheses will be performed through five tasks: 1) Develop an automated system to capture floor vibration and extract gait parameters; 2) Validate the system in laboratory setting; 3) Collect data at participant’s homes; 4) Test the hypothesis that at-home gait parameters are consistent with time and space; 5) Test the hypothesis that improvement in gait parameters correlates improvement in health status of recently discharged patients. This research will be pursued by a group of interdisciplinary researchers in engineering and physical therapy with the support of an experienced geriatric physician and will advance the knowledge in signal processing techniques, estimation and validation of at-home gait parameters and their uncertainty, and relationship between changes at-home gait parameters and changes in health status. The proposed activities will have a significant impact on older adult care, the research community and the next generation of researchers and engineers stemming from: 1) improved health of older adults and reduced health care cost by early intervening and thus decreasing the readmission rate; 2) increased scientific literacy and public engagement through benchmark problems, interdisciplinary seminars, new courses and outreach activities; 3) the training of diverse convergence researchers competent in solving interdisciplinary problems, including underrepresented groups in STEM fields.

The proposed research aligns with the mission of National Institute of Aging by developing automated, non-intrusive, privacy-preserving at-home gait assessment tools based on floor vibrations to correlate changes of gait parameters with the health status of older adults. The outcomes of this project will enable health professionals to monitor the well-being of the older population and manage recovery paradigms thereby improving the health and well-being of older Americans.