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Flexible Activity Tracking for Older Adults Using Mobility Aids — An Exploratory Study on Automatically Identifying Movement Modality

Published: 22 October 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Wearable activity trackers are inaccessible to older adults who use mobility aids (e.g., walker, wheelchair), because the accuracy of trackers drops considerably for such movement modalities (MMs). As an initial step to address this problem, we implemented and tested a minimum distance classifier to automatically identify the used MM out of seven modalities, including movement with or without a mobility aid, and no movement. Depending on the test setup, our classifier achieves accuracies between 82 % and 100 %. These findings can be leveraged in future work to combine the classifier with algorithms tailored to each mobility aid to make activity trackers accessible to users with limited mobility.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      ASSETS '22: Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
      October 2022
      902 pages
      ISBN:9781450392587
      DOI:10.1145/3517428
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      Published: 22 October 2022

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      Author Tags

      1. accessibility
      2. activity tracking
      3. machine learning
      4. mobility aids
      5. wearables

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