Someday our pace gets slower and our range of mobility becomes smaller. A slow decline in mobility is hard to detect, but it could be a herald of age-related decline and indicate a loss of mobility. It presents a crucial time point to suggest a targeted intervention to stabilize physical functioning and lower the risk of falls.
Important but lacking an assessment tool
Mobility is often referred to as the “sixth vital sign” – it is a basic integrator of older adults’ health and an important predictor for living independently. When a decline in mobility is detected early, it can be stabilized or even reversed by targeted intervention.
But so far, mobility of older adults is not assessed routinely by health care providers. Easy to use and valid instruments to measure mobility in primary health care are missing. This might be overcome by making use of the vast potential of modern technologies such as GPS and accelerometry, embedded in every modern smartphone.
Enabling early intervention
This project provides older adults and general practitioners with a novel smartphone application that allows them to easily quantify and appraise an individual’s real-life mobility. By following their patient’s mobility over time, general practitioners are able to recognize impending needs early on and to initiate targeted interventions such as exercise programs or management of joint problems. The new tool also provides an objective measure for other health care professionals, such as social workers, when life-changing decisions such as moving into a nursing home become necessary. The new smartphone app is freely available to health professionals, researchers, and patients.
The development is a result of an interdisciplinary collaboration of Timo Hinrichs, Denis Infanger and Andreas Zeller from several departments at the University of Basel, Robert Weibel and Haosheng Huang from the Geographic Information Systems unit at the University of Zurich as well as Erja Portegijs and Taina Rantanen from the Gerontology Research Center at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland.
