A mobile app to transparently distinguish single- from dual-task walking for the ecological monitoring of age-related changes in daily-life gait.

Background: Early detection of gait impairments in older adults allows the early uncovering of fall risk and/or cognitive deficits, resulting in timely interventions. Dual-task paradigms have been shown to be more sensitive than single-task conditions for the detection of subtle yet relevant gait impairments.

Research Question: Can a system - encompassing a pair of instrumented insoles and a customized mobile app - transparently and accurately study ecological walking activities in single- and dual-task conditions, with the aim of detecting early and subtle age-related alterations of gait?

Methods: The system was tested on 19 older adults during outdoor walking (two identical single-task trials and two motor-cognitive dual-task trials with the user engaged in a simple phone call and in a cognitive-demanding phone call).

IoT ink pen for ecological monitoring of daily life handwriting.

The analysis of the writing gesture has been successfully investigated in the diagnosis of age-related diseases, but the current technologies and methods still do not allow the ecological daily monitoring of handwriting, mostly because they rely on standardized writing protocols. In this study, we first designed and validated a novel electronic ink pen, equipped with motion and writing force sensing, for the ecological daily-life monitoring of handwriting in uncontrolled environments. We used the pen to acquire writing activities from healthy adults, from which we computed useful handwriting and tremor indicators.