Independent Lifestyles For

Elders Comes With Risks,

A Team of MU Researchers Say

January 23, 2008

COLUMBIA , Mo. – Americans are living longer and more fulfilling lives, and they desire to live as independently as possible. A team of University of Missouri researchers in nursing and engineering said this independent lifestyle comes with risks, such as debilitating falls.

“Billions of dollars are spent in healthcare costs in regards to treatment of falls,” said Marilyn Rantz, professor at the MU Sinclair School of Nursing, “Our research is targeted to not only detecting falls, but also conducting fall-risk assessment.”

A nearly million dollar grant from the U.S. Administration on Aging is allowing the researchers to create technology that enhances aging in place at TigerPlace.

Bring in the stunt actors. In an effort to accurately portray how seniors fall, the nursing researchers created scenarios for the stunt actors to follow. As the actors fell, the nursing researchers evaluated the realism of each fall. The engineering researchers filmed the falls so they could enter the information into a specialized computer system.

“The reason it's important that we have the stunt actors help us out is that we need to collect data of people falling down,” said Marge Skubic, electrical and computer engineering associate professor at the College of Engineering . “The falls need to be realistic in terms of the way older people really do fall. We then use this information to train our software programs so that we will be able to automatically recognize what these falls look like when they happen in real life.”

TigerPlace is a unique independent living, apartment-style eldercare facility designed by the School of Nursing in partnership with Americare Systems, Inc. Currently several of the residents have sensors installed in their apartments which monitor movement.

These "smart home" technologies are being developed to enhance residents' safety and monitor health conditions. The continuous assessment of physical function is a key indicator of initial decline in health. Identifying and assessing problems when they begin can provide a window of opportunity for interventions that will alleviate the problem areas before they become catastrophic.

However, motion and bed sensors can only verify physical function in general terms. In another project, Skubic is developing and evaluating vision-based recognition methods for multi-person environments. The cameras capture continuous images of elders' independent lifestyle. The computers take the visual information and convert it into silhouettes in a three-dimensional space thus preserving their privacy. This computer-generated person can indicate the difference between lying on the floor and lying on a couch thus helping with the concern of a false alarm, Skubic said.

“Alarms need to be accurate, sensitive to the event and not miss an event when it occurs,” Rantz said. “A high rate of false alarm, if we hear it too much, will be ignored.”

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