Currently submitted to: JMIR Aging
Date Submitted: May 26, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: May 28, 2026 - Jul 23, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Multimodal Digital Monitoring and Integration Practices in Older Adults: Scoping Review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Multimodal digital monitoring systems offer a promising avenue for the continuous, unobtrusive assessment of functional health and daily living in older adults, yet the extent to which existing studies leverage the core advantages of multimodality remains unclear.
Objective:
This scoping review aimed to systematically map the characteristics and implementation practices of multimodal digital monitoring systems used to assess daily living and functional health in older adults.
Methods:
A systematic search was conducted across four electronic databases (PubMed, EMBASE, CINAHL, and IEEE Xplore; January 2020–November 2025), from which 30 studies were included and data were charted using a standardized extraction form.
Results:
The predominant deployment profile combined ambient and mobile/wearable sensors in passive sensing configurations within home settings. Functional and physiological monitoring were well-represented; however, nutritional monitoring was entirely absent and social engagement substantially underrepresented, indicating a systematic gap relative to the multidimensional health needs of older adults. Despite increasing hardware sophistication, analytical integration of multimodal data remained limited.
Conclusions:
These findings show that although multimodal sensing has matured at the hardware level, the field is yet to fully realize its analytical and integrative potential in supporting the complex, person-centered needs of ageing populations.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.