Wearable devices reliable in assessing gait, chair stand speed at home in osteoarthritis
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Wearable devices demonstrate strong reliability in assessing gait and standing speed in the homes of patients with osteoarthritis, according to findings presented at the 2022 OARSI World Congress.
Wearable technologies to assess disease parameters and outcomes in patient homes have been gaining more widespread use in rheumatology in recent years, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Michael J. Rose, BS, of Boston University.
“COVID-19 expanded the adoption of such assessments,” he said. “Our objective was to examine the reliability of wearable sensor metrics during walking gait and chair stand speed in participants’ homes.”
The researchers also aimed to assess agreement between the outcomes assessed at home vs. those assessed in a laboratory by health care professionals.
The analysis included 20 patients with physician-diagnosed OA who had been recruited from the community. Eligible participants were required to be aged 50 years or older and able to walk for 20 minutes, while contraindication to exercise was a key exclusion criterion. The mean age among the participants was 70.5 years, while the mean BMI was 30.6. The cohort was 85% women and 95% white.
“The age and BMI were typical for an OA cohort,” Rose said.
The researchers provided patients with a tablet computer for communications, a chair and cones to check standing speed and gait distance, and a sensor to determine parameters of their physical challenges.
For the gait assessment, participants were asked to walk four laps of a 7-meter track. For the chair assessment, they were to stand up as quickly as possible without using their arms. The challenges were administered once in a health care setting to establish a baseline. At home, participants were asked to test and retest the two challenges.
Results demonstrated “good to excellent” reliability between the first and second tests at home, according to Rose.
“This implies that gait and standing speed outcomes collected using our approach can be used in clinical studies,” he said. “Individuals typically representative of an OA population were generally accepting and willing to participate in a remote visit, showing the feasibility of our approach.”
The agreement between the data collected at home and those collected in the laboratory was “moderate to excellent,” as opposed to “good to excellent,” according to Rose. He added that data collected at home may have “greater ecological validity” than those collected in health care settings.
“People walked faster and stood up faster in the lab than at home,” he said.
Rose added that there were some reported logistical and technical challenges with the equipment.
“Two participants had gait data that were unusable,” he said.
“Wearable sensor-derived walking gait and chair stand measures collected in a person’s home environment had good to excellent reliability in repeated measures, and moderate to excellent agreement with measures collected in a lab environment,” Rose concluded.
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Rose MJ. Reliability of wearable sensors for assessing gait and chair stand function at home in people with knee osteoarthritis. Presented at: OARSI 2022 World Congress on Osteoarthritis; April 7-10; Berlin, Germany (virtual meeting).
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