Reliability, Validity, and Identification Ability of a Commercialized Waist-Attached Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) Sensor-Based System in Fall Risk Assessment of Older People
Kejing Li, Nicky Lok-Yi Wong, Man-Ching Law, Freddy Man Hin Lam, Hoi-Ching Wong, Tsz-On Chan, Kit-Naam Wong, Yong‐Ping Zheng, Qi-Yao Huang, Arnold Yu Lok Wong, Timothy Kwok, Christina Zong‐Hao
Abstract
Falls are a prevalent cause of injury among older people. While some wearable inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor-based systems have been widely investigated for fall risk assessment, their reliability, validity, and identification ability in community-dwelling older people remain unclear. Therefore, this study evaluated the performance of a commercially available IMU sensor-based fall risk assessment system among 20 community-dwelling older recurrent fallers (with a history of ≥2 falls in the past 12 months) and 20 community-dwelling older non-fallers (no history of falls in the past 12 months), together with applying the clinical scale of the Mini-Balance Evaluation Systems Test (Mini-BESTest). The results show that the IMU sensor-based system exhibited a significant moderate to excellent test–retest reliability (ICC = 0.838, p < 0.001), an acceptable level of internal consistency reliability (Spearman’s rho = 0.471, p = 0.002), an acceptable convergent validity (Cronbach’s α = 0.712), and an area under the curve (AUC) value of 0.590 for the IMU sensor-based receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve. The findings suggest that while the evaluated IMU sensor-based system exhibited good reliability and acceptable validity, it might not be able to fully identify the recurrent fallers and non-fallers in a community-dwelling older population. Further system optimization is still needed.