Reliability, validity, and identification ability of a commercialized waist-attached inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor-based system in fall risk assessment of older people

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 alpha = 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.